Transcriber’s Notes

Corrected text is marked with a dotted underline. A list of corrections can be found at the end of this eBook.

[Other notes] may be found at the end of this eBook.

LAWRENCE AND THE ARABS

Onager solitarius in desiderio animi
sui attraxit ventum amoris. Jeremiah

LAWRENCE

from a bust by ERIC KENNINGTON

LAWRENCE AND THE
ARABS

By

ROBERT GRAVES

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITED BY
ERIC KENNINGTON
MAPS BY
HERRY PERRY

LONDON
JONATHAN CAPE 30 BEDFORD SQUARE

FIRST PUBLISHED IN MCMXXVII
MADE & PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY BUTLER & TANNER LTD
FROME AND
LONDON

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

Early this June I was invited by the publishers to write a book about Lawrence. I replied that I would do so with Lawrence’s consent. Shaw, as I must call him, for he has now taken that name and definitely discarded ‘Lawrence,’ cabled his permission from India, and followed it up with a letter giving me a list of sources for my writing and saying that since a book was intended about him anyway he would prefer it done by me. He thought that I could write a book accurate enough in its facts to discourage further unauthorized accounts and that he could trust me not to spare his own feelings wherever I wished to draw any critical conclusion. And he hoped that the book would have exhausted all public interest by the time that he had finished with the Royal Air Force and returned to civil life.

I have his most generous permission, with that of his trustees, to use copyright material at my discretion—but certain limits were given—both from Revolt in the Desert and from Seven Pillars of Wisdom (of which that is an abridgment), a book that will not be issued for public sale in Shaw’s lifetime. Unfortunately owing to pressure of time my completed typescript could not be submitted to Shaw before publication and I apologize to him for any passages where my discretion has been at fault. I did, however, write and ask him specific questions and sent him rough drafts of nearly all my material. I must, however, draw a clear line between Shaw’s approval of my writing the book if it had to be written, and my own responsibility for the facts and opinions given here.

These chapters contain much that is of interest, I hope, even to readers of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom; and readers of Revolt in the Desert may be glad of a narrative that is continuous. Critics must remember that Shaw, when preparing the Seven Pillars for private circulation, had in mind an audience of not more than a couple of hundred people and that he consequently had greater freedom in his vocabulary than I have had; and could also assume a specialized knowledge of Eastern history, geography and politics in his audience that I am not permitted to assume.

I have tried to give a picture of an exasperatingly complex personality in the easiest possible terms. I have tried also to make a difficult story as clear as may be by a cutting-down of the characters that occur in it; mentioning by name only the outstanding ones and explaining the rest in such terms as ‘a member of the body-guard,’ ‘a British Staff-officer with Feisal,’ ‘a major-general,’ ‘a French colonel,’ ‘the chief of the Beni Sakhr,’ etc. (Geography has been similarly simplified; the maps have been designed so that few places occur on them that are not mentioned in that part of the story to which they refer, and few or no places are mentioned in the story that are not to be found on the maps.)

This is not the method of history, but history, which is the less readable the more historical it is, will not eventually be hindered by anything I have written. I have attempted a critical study of ‘Lawrence’—the popular verdict that he is the most remarkable living Englishman, though I dislike such verdicts, I am inclined to accept—rather than a general review of the Arab freedom movement and the part played by England and France in regard to it. And there has been a space-limit.

For information about Lawrence I am greatly indebted to Mrs. Fontana, Mrs. Thomas Hardy, Mrs. Lawrence (his mother), Mrs. Kennington, Mrs. Bernard Shaw, Field-Marshal Viscount Allenby, Colonel John Buchan, Colonel R. V. Buxton, Colonel Alan Dawnay, Mr. E. M. Forster, Mr. Philip Graves, Sir Robert Graves, Dr. D. G. Hogarth, Mr. Cecil Jane, Mr. Eric Kennington, Mr. Arnold Lawrence (a younger brother), Sir Henry McMahon, Private Palmer of the Royal Tank Corps, Serjeant Pugh of the Royal Air Force, Mr. Vyvyan Richards, Lord Riddell, Mr. Siegfried Sassoon, Lord Stamfordham, the Dean of Winchester, Mr. C. Leonard Woolley, and others.

For permission to use copyright photographs, to The Times, the Imperial War Museum, the French Army Photographic Department, Major Goslett, Colonel R. V. Buxton, Dr. D. G. Hogarth, Serjeant Pugh, Mr. Eric Kennington, and Aircraftman Shaw himself.

R. G.

August, 1927.

LAWRENCE AND THE ARABS

I

I write of him as Lawrence since I first knew him by that name, though, with the rest of his friends, I now usually address him as ‘T. E.’: his initials at least seem fixed and certain. In 1923 when he enlisted as a private soldier in the Royal Tank Corps he took the name of ‘T. E. Shaw’: and has continued in that name in the Royal Air Force, confirming the alteration by Deed Poll. His enlistment in 1922 was in the name of ‘Ross’ and these two are not, he admits, his only efforts to ‘label himself suitably.’ He chose ‘Shaw’ and ‘Ross’ more or less at random from an Army List, though their shortness recommended them and probably also their late positions in the alphabet; troops sometimes get lined up in alphabetical order of names and Lawrence avoids the right of the line by instinct. He was tired of the name Lawrence,—and found it too long—particularly of the name ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ which had become a romantic catchword and a great nuisance to him. Hero worship seems not only to annoy Lawrence but, because of a genuine belief in his own fraudulence as its object, to make him feel physically unclean; and few who have heard or read of Lawrence of Arabia now mention the name without a superstitious wonder or fail to lose their heads if they happen to meet the man. A good enough excuse for discarding the name Lawrence was that it never had any proud family traditions for him. Mr. Lowell Thomas, who has written an inaccurate and sentimental account of Lawrence, links him up with the Northern Irish family of that name and with the famous Indian Mutiny hero ‘who tried to do his duty’: this is an invention and not a good one. ‘Lawrence’ began as a name of convenience like ‘Ross’ or ‘Shaw,’ and Lawrence was never of the tribe which does things because public duty is public duty. He acts in all things for his own best reasons, which though perhaps—I might say ‘certainly’—honourable are never either public or obvious. The Arabs addressed him as ‘Aurans’ or ‘Lurens,’ but his nickname among them was Emir Dinamit, or Prince Dynamite, for his explosive energy. Old Auda, the fighting chief of the Howeitat, used to called him ‘The World’s Imp,’ which is better still.

He was born at Tremadoc in North Wales in August 1888. This proved useful because later at Oxford University he could enter Jesus College, which financially favours Welsh students, as a Welshman. Actually he is of very mixed blood, none of it Welsh; if I remember rightly it is Irish, Hebridean, Spanish, and Norse. This again has always been useful; mixed blood has meant for Lawrence a natural gift for learning foreign languages, a respect for the manners and customs of strange people and, more than this, the power of entering a foreign community and being accepted after a time as a member of it. He has, also, no sense of the superiority of the English over foreigners. This he puts down merely to his general disrespect for humanity; but a strong natural bias towards the English may be suspected if only as towards the speakers of English, a language for which he cannot conceal his affection.

His father, now dead, came from County Meath in Ireland, of Leicestershire stock settled in the time of Sir Walter Raleigh. He was a great sportsman. The mixed blood is chiefly from this side. His mother who two years ago went off unconcernedly to end her days with a mission in Central China—but has recently been sent back home much against her will because of political troubles there—is a woman of decision and quiet power: with features like Lawrence’s. She told me once: ‘We could never be bothered with girls in our house’: and, conveniently, she had five sons and no daughters. This home-atmosphere possibly accounts for Lawrence’s world being so empty of women: he was brought up to do without female society and the habit has remained with him. That he has a fear or hatred of all women is untrue. He tries to talk to a woman as he would talk to another man, or to himself. If she does not return the compliment by talking to him as she would to another woman, he leaves her. He has no false sense of chivalry. He is not a courtier but neither is he a boor.

His childhood was spent in Scotland, the Isle of Man, Jersey, France and Hampshire. In France he attended a Jesuit school, though neither he nor his family were Catholics. From Hampshire the family came to Oxford where Lawrence went to the City of Oxford School. Of his boyhood at Oxford there are stories that show that he began being the person Lawrence early. He took an interest in archæology which elder people thought unwholesome in a boy, and when old buildings were pulled down or excavations made was always on the spot. He had a secret arrangement with the city workmen to give him any pieces of pottery or other finds that they made and was soon an actual expert on the pottery of the Middle Ages. He had a theory which he intended to prove in a book that the dating of ancient pottery in England is all wrong, much of what is called Roman pottery being really Saxon: but that book he has never found time to write. At the age of thirteen he began a series of bicycle tours round England by himself and in pursuit of a study of mediæval armour made a large collection of brass-rubbings from old monuments in country churches. He made a point at his home of never saying when or where he was going or when he would be back. He liked to return at night by an upper window and be found in bed the next morning. To avoid surveillance later he refused to sleep in the house at all, but used a summer-house in the garden (he built it himself) as his bedroom. He explored the many streams about Oxford in a canoe: (and in after years brought a canoe with him at great expense to Mesopotamia, where it was the first canoe ever seen on the River Euphrates). Not content with the streams above ground he began exploring the underground streams of Oxford City. Probably he made a map; maps were his speciality. He made eight tours of France in his school vacations, studying the cathedrals and castles, and living on practically nothing. When he was sixteen he broke a leg while he was wrestling with another boy at the Oxford City School. He said nothing until school ended for the day and then returned home, not able to walk, on a borrowed bicycle. (He has never grown since that date.)

He took no interest in school games because they were organized, because they had rules, because they had results. He will never compete in anything. He was interested in machinery—(he is still an expert on racing cars and such-like, and after the War occupied part of his leisure with the help of the makers of the Brough Superior motor-cycle in testing and reporting on their next year’s models). He read widely, carefully and rapidly in several languages, his chief study being mediæval art, particularly sculpture. What is more remarkable is that while he was still at the High School he began thinking about that very revolt of the Arabs against the Turks which is the main story of this book.

At Jesus College in the University, where he won a scholarship, he read for the History School; or was supposed to do so. As a matter of fact the three years were spent chiefly in reading French Provençal poetry and mediæval Chansons de Geste. Mr. Vyvyan Richards, a fellow-undergraduate, has told me: ‘There was a mystery in the College about a strange undergraduate who never appeared in the daytime but spent hours of the night walking round the quadrangle by himself; I was one of those appointed to investigate; that was how I first discovered Lawrence. I patronized him at first as a second-year man does a first-year man, but I soon stopped that. I remember once I was teasing him for his theories about pottery; we were walking on the New College mound which is supposed to have been thrown up in the Civil Wars. I kicked up a bit of pottery and said to him, “You’ll tell me next that this proves something.” “Thank you,” he said, “as it happens it does. It goes to prove that this mound is considerably older than Cromwell’s time.” That silenced me. He never took any part in College life and never dined in Hall. Once in winter he arrived at my lodgings after midnight and asked me to come bathing. He wanted me to try the sport of diving through the ice: I thought it too dangerous, so he went off alone. He had a wonderful library, and was much interested in printing. It has been said that he printed books with me; but this is not true; there was much planning about it, but it never came off.’

Lawrence only lived one term in the College itself: the remainder of the time he was allowed to live at home. He read all night and slept in the mornings. He was not only a non-smoker and total abstainer but a vegetarian. In all his University life, as at school, he never took part in or watched a single organized game, though I believe he did a certain amount of roof-climbing, an unorganized night-sport which is entirely against University regulations. He is said to have invented the now classic climb from Balliol college to Keble college, a distance of perhaps a third of a mile, with only a single drop in between. This Lawrence neither confirms nor denies. He had a lively admiration for his tutor R. L. Poole and only once ‘cut’ a tutorial, then wrote to apologize. Poole replied: ‘Don’t worry yourself at having failed to come to me last Tuesday. Your absence gave me the opportunity to do an hour’s useful work.’ He apparently only attended three courses of lectures in the whole of his three years and found these unprofitable.

Mr. Cecil Jane writes of this period:

‘I coached him in his last year at the Oxford City School and saw a great deal of him all through his time at Oxford. He would never read the obvious books. I found out in the first week or two that the thing was to suggest rather out-of-the-way books. He could be relied upon to get more out of a suggestive sentence in a book than any ordinary man would get from a volume. His work was always on his own lines, even to the hours when he came to me. Shortly after midnight to 4 a.m. was a favourite time (living at home he had not to bother about College regulations: it was enough for his mother to report that he was “home by twelve”). He had the most diverse interests historically, though they were mainly mediæval. For a long time I could not get him to take any interest in late European History—was very startled to find that he was absorbed by R. M. Johnston’s French Revolution. While he was at school still I used to be surprised by his fondness for analysing character: it was a little habit of his to put questions to me in order to watch my expression: he would make no comment on my answer but I could see that he thought the more. In many ways he resembled his father, quite one of the most charming men I have known—very shy, very kind. Lawrence was not a bookworm though he read very fast and a great deal. I should not call him a scholar by temperament and the main characteristic of his work was always that it was unusual without the effort to be unusual. He liked anything in the nature of satire; that is why he appreciated Gibbon’s notes so much. He was very diffident about his own work; he never published his really admirable (but small) degree thesis. He was very robust, a little difficult to know, and always unexpected.’

When the time came for his final examinations for his degree Lawrence was unprepared. He was advised to submit a special thesis to supplement his other papers. He chose as his subject ‘The influence of the Crusades on the mediæval military architecture of Europe.’ Even before he went to the University, he had specialized in mediæval fortifications and had visited every single twelfth-century castle in England and France; it now remained for him to go to Palestine and Syria and study the Crusaders’ castles there. He decided to go out in the summer months of 1909, his last long vacation. He had learned a smattering of Arabic from a half-Irish Arab, then lecturing at Oxford, who advised him, if he went, to save expenses by living on the hospitality of the Syrian tribes. It was to be his first visit to the part of the world where he later became famous.

Before he left he visited Dr. D. G. Hogarth, the present Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, whom he met on this occasion for the first time but who has been his close friend ever since—‘the man to whom I am indebted for every good job I have ever had except my enlistment in the Royal Air Force.’ He told Hogarth that he was going to visit Syria to study Crusaders’ castles but wished to know where he would be likely to find remains of the ancient Hittite civilization, Hogarth told him what he wanted but said, ‘This is the wrong season to visit Syria: it is too hot there now.’ ‘I’m going,’ said Lawrence. ‘Well, have you the money? You’ll want a guide and servants to carry your tent and baggage.’ ‘I’m going to walk,’ Lawrence said. ‘Europeans don’t walk in Syria,’ said Hogarth, ‘it isn’t safe or pleasant.’ ‘Well, I do,’ said Lawrence. He went and was away for four months, returning to Oxford late for the next term. He had been on foot, in European dress and brown boots, carrying only a camera, from Haifa on the north coast of Palestine to the Taurus mountains and across to Urfa by the Euphrates in Northern Mesopotamia. He brought back sketch-plans and photographs of every mediæval fortress in Syria and also a collection of Hittite seals from the Aintab region for Hogarth. He had had two bouts of fever, Dr. Hogarth tells me, and had once been nearly murdered. The fever is perhaps hardly worth mentioning: Lawrence has had fever so often that he is quite used to it. He got malaria in France when he was sixteen and has had countless returns of it since. When he was eighteen he got Malta fever and since then has had dysentery, typhoid, blackwater fever, smallpox and other varieties.

The murder story has often been told, but incorrectly. What happened was that Lawrence on his way to Syria had bought a copper watch at Paris for ten francs. By constant use the case had been polished till it shone. In a Turkman village near the banks of the Euphrates where he was collecting Hittite antiquities he took out this watch one morning; the villagers murmured ‘Gold.’ A villager stalked Lawrence all day as he went on his journey and towards evening ran ahead and met him, as if accidentally. Lawrence asked the way to a certain village. The Turkman showed him a short cut across country; where he sprang upon Lawrence, knocked him down, snatched his Colt revolver, put it to his head and pulled the trigger. Though loaded it did not go off: the villager did not understand the mechanism of the safety catch, which was raised. He tried the trigger again and then in anger threw it away and battered Lawrence about the head with stones. The appearance of a shepherd fortunately frightened him off before he had succeeded in cracking Lawrence’s skull. Lawrence got up, crossed the Euphrates to the nearest town (Birejik) where he could find Turkish policemen. There he presented the order that he had from the Turkish Ministry of the Interior requiring all local governors to afford him every help, and collected a hundred and ten men. With this force, whose ferry-fare he had to pay across the river, he re-entered the village. Contrary to the usual story of a desperate fight and the burning of the village, there was no violence. Lawrence, with fever heavy on him, went to sleep while the usual day-long argument went on between the police and the villagers. At night the village elders gave up the stolen property and the thief. The true version of the story is better if only because it has this more satisfactory ending that the thief afterwards worked in the diggings at Carchemish under Lawrence; not too well, but Lawrence was easy with him.

During this walk he lodged every night, when off the beaten track, in the nearest native village, taking advantage of the hospitality which poor Syrians always show towards other poor; and began his familiarity with Arab dialects. Lawrence is not an Arabic scholar. He has never sat down to study it, nor even learned its letters—in any case twenty years’ study are needed before anyone can call himself an Arabic scholar and Lawrence has had a better use for his time. But he is fluent in conversational Arabic, and can tell pretty accurately by a man’s accent and the expressions he uses from what tribe or district of Arabia, Syria, Mesopotamia or Palestine he comes. On his return to Oxford he was awarded a First Class Honours Degree in History on the strength of his thesis, and the examiners were so impressed that they celebrated the event by a special dinner at which Lawrence’s tutor, Poole, was the host.

It is circumstantially related that the piece of archæological news which most delighted Oxford concerned the burial of Crusaders in the Holy Land; that it was known already that a knight who had been on one Crusade and died at home had his legs and the legs of his effigy crossed at the ankle, that a knight who had been on two Crusades had his legs crossed at the knee, but that Lawrence found that Crusaders who had died in the Holy Land itself were buried with their toes turned inwards. The incrustations of the Lawrence legend are typified in this completely false and widely current story. In the first place, Lawrence made no such discovery. In the second, he does not believe that the crossing of the legs of the effigies has anything to do with the Crusades. Let me take the opportunity of contradicting a further absurd story of Lawrence’s adventures about this time among the head-hunters of Borneo. Somebody has confused him, I suppose, with Rajah Charles Brooke of Sarawak; Mr. Lowell Thomas gives the story, alleging a British Museum mission.

The desert took a strong hold on Lawrence. He went riding out on one occasion (a year or two later) over a rolling plain in Northern Syria to examine a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed to have been made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay with which it was built was said to have been kneaded not with water but with the precious essential oils of flowers. His guides, sniffing the air, led him from one crumbling room to the next, saying, This is jessamine, this is violet, this is rose.’ But at last an Arab said, ‘Come and smell the sweetest scent of all,’ and they went to the main hall, where they drank in the calm, empty, eddyless desert wind. ‘This,’ said the Arab, ‘is the best, it has no taste.’ The Bedouin, Lawrence recognized, turns his back on perfumes and luxuries and the petty business of towns because in the desert he is without doubt free: he has lost material ties, houses, gardens, superfluous possessions and all other such complications, and has won instead a personal liberty in the shadow of starvation and death. This was an attitude that moved Lawrence greatly, so that, I believe, his nature has ever since been divided into two conflicting selves, the Bedouin self always longing for the bareness, simplicity, harshness of the desert—that state of mind of which the desert is a symbol—and the over-civilized European self. The European self despises the Bedouin as one who loves to torture himself needlessly and who sees the world as a hard pattern of black and white (of luxury or poverty, saintliness or sin, honour or disgrace), not as a moving changing landscape of countless subtle colours and shades and varieties. Again, the conflict is between the fanatic who is always either on the crest or in the trough of his emotions, who loves and hates violently, and the over-civilized man whose chief aim in life is to keep an equal mind even if he undoes himself by the very wideness of his sympathies. These two selves are mutually destructive, so Lawrence has finally fallen between them into a nihilism which cannot find, in being, even a false god in which to believe.

Magdalen College, on Hogarth’s prompting, gave him a travelling scholarship for four years, and this enabled him to continue with his archæology. In 1910 he first went with Dr. Hogarth and Mr. Campbell-Thompson on the British Museum expedition to excavate Carchemish, the ruined Hittite capital on the Syrian bank of the Euphrates. Hogarth had engaged him on the strength of his Syrian walking tour and his knowledge of pottery. He was not a trained archæologist as yet, but an odd-job man at fifteen shillings a day and made it his main business to look after the gangs and keep them happy. For the rest, he had the photography, the pottery, the piecing together of broken sculptures and, later, engineering work in laying or lifting the light railway that carried earth from the diggings to the dumps. But the gangs came first. While they were happy the work was sure to go well. Lawrence knew them all by name and even the names of their children for whom they would beg quinine when there was fever about. Only he never knew any one of the men by sight; a peculiarity of Lawrence’s which will be discussed later.

In the winter of 1910, in the off-season for digging, Hogarth arranged for Lawrence to visit Sir Flinders Petrie’s camp in Egypt, to study the most advanced technical methods in digging. The camp was in a village near the Fayoum and the work was the uncovering of pre-dynastic remains of about the year 4000 B.C. Sir Flinders Petrie was at first not impressed with Lawrence’s appearance, and it is said reprimanded him for appearing at the camp in football shorts and a blazer. ‘Young man, we do not play cricket here.’ The absurdity of Lawrence as a cricket enthusiast is not the least comic point in the tale. However, Sir Flinders Petrie soon realized that he was a useful man to have with him, and tried to get him to join the camp again another year. But Lawrence thought that Egyptian excavations were dull compared with Hittite excavations. The Hittite was still an unknown civilization; with the Egyptians the main problems were solved and all that remained was to fill in unimportant gaps. The only personal recollection I heard from Lawrence about this digging in Egypt was that often in the evening when the sun suddenly sank and it got very cold he and his fellow-workers used to wrap themselves round and round for warmth in the white linen cloth which had been buried with these pre-dynastic Egyptians for their next-world wear (it was a period before mummy-wrappings) and walk home that way smelling of spices.

As an archæologist Lawrence soon won reputation. His memory for details is extraordinary, almost morbid. A friend once joked about him ‘there is something of the thin-lipped Oxford don about Lawrence’; but that was no more than saying that Lawrence has a vast well-ordered store of accurate technical knowledge on every conceivable subject and does not like to hear amateurs talk inaccurately when he is about. Half a dozen decisive words from Lawrence and superfluous talk ends. I was present once when an American writer who only knew Lawrence as a soldier began to teach him about Arabic art. Very soon finding himself in deep water the writer shifted to ground where he thought he was safe: he began to talk about Aztec stone carvings in Central America. Lawrence listened politely and corrected him on a technicality. After that the American stopped talking and listened. Field-Marshal Allenby, who is interested in archæology (and during the War took away the command of at least one officer because he pulled down an ancient building), told me: ‘When Lawrence and I talked archæology it was always Father Lawrence talking to a little schoolboy. I listened and learned.’

Probably Lawrence’s knowledge is not so vast as it appears and the impression of omniscience that he conveys is due rather to a faculty of forgetting what he calls utterly useless knowledge such as higher mathematics, class-room metaphysics and theories of æsthetics, and of fitting together harmoniously what he does know. A small knowledge which is in harmony with itself will seem uncanny to those with a much greater store of facts that do not hold together. Still, Lawrence’s knowledge must be pretty extensive. In six years he read every book in the library of the Oxford Union—the best part of 50,000 volumes, probably. His father used to get him the books while he was at school and afterwards he always borrowed six volumes a day in his father’s name and his own. For three years he read day and night on a hearthrug, which was a mattress so that he could fall asleep as he read. Often he spent eighteen hours a day reading, and at last got so good at it that he could tear the heart out of the most formidable book in half an hour. In reviewing Lawrence’s life, one has to accept casually such immoderate feats; they are part of his nature and the large number of them that can be verified excuses one’s credulity for others of the same remarkable character that are pure fiction.

Lawrence has been known to give information, when provoked, even where it could hardly be expected to be appreciated. ‘What are you grinning at, you there?’ shouted a sergeant-instructor to him one day about two years ago, when he was in the Tank Corps. ‘Do you really want to know, Sergeant?’ said Lawrence. He did. So Lawrence explained a joke in a late-Greek dialogue of Lucian’s that he had been turning over in his mind during arms-drill. He quoted for a quarter of an hour and the sergeant and squad listened without interruption in the greatest interest. Again, in a hut in the Air Force a comrade once asked him, ‘Excuse me, Shaw, but what does “iconoclast” mean?’—he acted as a handy cross-word dictionary—and then Lawrence outlined a brief history of the religious politics in fifth-century Constantinople which first gave rise to the word. But this is merely a good-humoured joke on himself: he despises mere knowledge, though he accumulates it and stores it carefully from old habit. He despises it because it is imperfect, because he sees knowledge as the opposite of wisdom. He never bluffs; and he dislikes bluffers. They say that in his first days in the Royal Air Force three years ago he helped some of the fellows who were taking German as an extra part of the education course. This came to the notice of one of the officers, who heard that Aircraftman Shaw had been seen reading a book called Faust. The next day, finding Shaw with his book, the officer began to show off: ‘What a wonderful writer Goethe was! Faust is a masterpiece, don’t you agree? Now, this is a passage that has always appealed to me very much’ (pointing over Shaw’s shoulder). ‘Yes,’ said Shaw, ‘but this is not Goethe’s Faust but Jacobsen’s Nills Lyhne in Danish.’ His knowledge does not help him much in the Royal Air Force. The Education Officer at Uxbridge asked him: ‘And you, what is the subject in which you feel particularly weak?’ The other fellows had said ‘French’ and ‘Geography’ and ‘Mathematics.’ Lawrence replied simply and truthfully, ‘Polishing greasy boots.’

This is getting too far ahead of the story, which is still about Lawrence as an archæologist before the War. In 1911 he was again at Carchemish with Hogarth. The report of the Carchemish excavations which lasted from 1910 to 1914 is published by the Oxford University Press. After 1911 Dr. Hogarth left the operations in charge of Mr. G. Leonard Woolley, who re-engaged Lawrence. A visitor, Mr. Fowle, has given a description of the life at the camp when he visited it in 1913. The Turks had given permission to the excavators to build only a single room; Lawrence and Woolley kept the letter and broke the spirit of the order by building a large U-shaped building and then partitioning it off into compartments each with a separate door into the courtyard that this single room enclosed. The compartments to the right were used for storing antiquities and for photographic work (Lawrence’s particular care); the sleeping-rooms of the excavators and their guests were on the left. The middle of the U was a living room with an open fireplace, well-filled book-cases and a long table covered with current British journals and the archæological journals of all the world. According to Mrs. Fontana, wife of the former Italian Consul at Aleppo, the house, which was of mud-brick, was paved with a Roman mosaic found in the upper layers of the excavations. She relates how Lawrence would cross the Euphrates in his canoe to get flowers from an island on the far side to liven up the place; a dangerous voyage, it seemed to her, for the Euphrates has a very powerful current. In its marvellously soft water he used to bathe every day. He had also got the workmen to make him a long clay water-chute and taught them the sport of tobogganing down it into the river.

Woolley and Lawrence had soon come to be on the best possible terms with their workmen, who were of mixed races: Kurds, Arabs, Turks, and so on. Local brigands were working for them at the diggings, including the leaders of the two most notorious brigand bands, the Kurdish and the Arab, and the two Englishmen were so well known and respected that they were made judges of various local disputes between villages or persons. Mr. Fowle relates that Lawrence had recently been away to settle a case where a man had kidnapped a girl from her father’s house but had not been able to get the father’s consent to a marriage.

In Woolley’s bedroom was an ancient wooden chest containing thousands of silver pieces for the payment of the workmen. It was unlocked and unguarded; because if any man had come to steal from it the other workmen would soon have found him out and taken matters into their own hands and probably killed the thief. Lawrence and Woolley found that the way to get the best results was to pay the workmen an extra sum of money for any antiquity that they found, according to its actual value. The workers accepted the sum offered without question, whether they were given gold or small silver, and the more willingly because the Englishmen accepted nothing that was not paid for. If the object offered was valueless it was returned to them. They came to take a real interest in the work and Mr. Fowle records the excitement with which the uncovering of a Hittite stone carving was watched, and the burst of applause and firing of two hundred revolvers when the four-thousand-year-old figure of a superb stag was revealed.

Lawrence himself, as Dr. Hogarth tells me, preferred sleeping outside the hut on a knoll, the ancient citadel of the city, close to the river. Here would gather the diggers and amuse him with stories, many of them scandalous, about the old Sheik of Jerablus (the modern village on the site of Carchemish) and his young wife, and about the Germans in their camp a quarter of a mile away. A railway was being made from Constantinople to Bagdad and at the site of Carchemish the railway had to cross the Euphrates. German engineers were building a bridge. The Germans could not be bothered to get to know their workmen by name, but used numbers painted on their coats as the quickest way of recognizing them. They even allowed members of tribes who were blood enemies to work side by side and many deaths happened this way. The Germans envied Lawrence and Woolley because they could always get as many workmen as they wanted. On one occasion when the Englishmen had to turn away fifty men for lack of money to pay them with, the men refused to go but stayed on without pay until money might come again.

With the Germans there was good feeling. Woolley and Lawrence gave them permission among other things to cart off for their new buildings such stones from the diggings as were of no archæological interest. But the chief engineer, Contzen, was a difficult man to remain friendly with. He was a rough drinking fellow, the son of a Cologne chemist. The back of his neck was too thick for Lawrence’s taste: it lapped over his collar. He came once to ask permission to dig away some mounds of earth which, though inside the excavation area, were close to the bridge where he wanted earth for an embankment. This was refused because the mounds of earth were the old mud-brick city walls of Carchemish and of great archæological importance. He grew angry at that and breaking off all friendly relations decided to wait until the digging season ended and the Englishmen went away. So when Woolley had gone to England and Lawrence to the Lebanon mountains, Contzen recruited local labour for digging away the walls. There was an Aleppo Arab called Wahid the Pilgrim left in charge of the diggings in the absence of the Englishmen, who, hearing what Contzen was about to do, went over to the German camp and told him that without orders from Woolley or Lawrence he could not allow the work to begin. Contzen answered that he would start the next day and ordered Wahid to leave the camp. Wahid sent a wire to Lawrence in the Lebanon, saying that he would hold up the work until further orders. He went the next morning with a rifle and two revolvers and sat on top of the threatened wall. A hundred workmen began laying a light-railway from the embankment to the foot of the wall, and Wahid addressed them, promising that he would shoot the first man who drove a pick into the wall, and then would shoot any German within range. The workmen, many of whom were of the English camp but doing temporary work in the off-season, stopped work and sat down at a safe distance. Contzen came up and threatened, but Wahid levelled his rifle and told him to keep his distance: Contzen did not dare to do more. All that day the two parties sat and watched each other, and all the next day. That night the Germans began a little revolver practice in their courtyard, shooting at a lighted candle: Wahid climbed up on the wall and fired half a dozen shots over their heads, shouting to them to stop their noise and go to bed: and they obeyed.

Lawrence wired to Wahid to hold on; he was now in Aleppo seeing to things. Wahid wired back that the Germans were becoming dangerous, and that the next morning he was going to the camp to kill Contzen. Then he made his will, got drunk and prepared for the morning. Lawrence in Aleppo found he could do nothing with the local Turkish Officials in whose care the diggings were supposed to be, so he wired to Constantinople, and got an unexpectedly quick reply: the Turkish Education Minister was ordered to go up to Carchemish in person and stop the work. Lawrence wired an order to Wahid to offer no further resistance to the Germans. He sent the wire by the railway telegraph, and the railway people, who naturally were on Contzen’s side in his embankment-making, knew nothing of the orders from Constantinople to stop the work and thought that the opposition was at an end. Lawrence and the Minister were given a motor trolley, on which they travelled at once. Wahid, getting the wire, was deeply disappointed and went off to drown his sorrows in drink. Contzen set his gang to work on the wall. They had hardly moved two or three feet of earth and mud-brick when up came the Minister in a fury, with Lawrence behind him, and made Contzen tear up the rails and dismiss his extra workmen, abusing him for his dishonesty. Wahid was publicly congratulated.

After this there was further trouble with Contzen. (Though not with the German camp as a whole as has been said: Woolley and Lawrence kept open house and the better Germans used to visit them regularly and dine with them.) One day, Ahmed, one of the house-servants of Woolley and Lawrence, on his way home from shopping at the village, met the foreman of a gang of railway workers. The foreman owed him money and a dispute started. A German engineer came up and flogged Ahmed without inquiring into the cause of the dispute: it was enough that the railway work had been delayed. Lawrence went to Contzen, and told him that one of the engineers had assaulted his house-servant and must apologize. Contzen consented to make inquiries, called up the engineer, and asked him for his account of the affair. He then told Lawrence angrily, ‘It is all a lie. This gentleman never assaulted your servant; he merely had him flogged.’

‘Well, isn’t that an assault?’

‘Certainly not. You can’t use these natives without flogging them. We flog every day.’

‘We have been here longer than you and have not flogged a man yet, and don’t intend to let you start on them. Your engineer must come to the village and apologize to Ahmed in public.’

‘Nonsense. The incident is closed,’ and Contzen turned his back.

‘On the contrary,’ said Lawrence (one can hear his small deadly voice), ‘if you don’t do as I ask I shall take the matter into my own hands.’

Contzen turned round again. ‘Which means—?’

‘That I shall take your engineer to the village and compel him to apologize.’

‘You will do nothing of the sort,’ said Contzen, scandalized; but then he looked at Lawrence again. In the end the engineer came to make his public apology, to the vast satisfaction of the village.

Later the Germans found themselves in great trouble. They had established a local bakery to prevent their men sending parties for bread to their home-villages every ten days. This bread-getting meant that thirty or forty men missed a day’s work. The Germans let the bakery to a town-bred Syrian (one of a most dishonest race), who decided to make his fortune. He used bad corn and so the bread was too sour to eat. The Germans had arranged that the money for the bread supplied should be deducted from the men’s pay. When the workmen refused to eat the bread and again sent home to the villages for their own, the price of the week’s bread that they had refused was deducted from their pay. Not only the bread contract but the contract for getting men to work on the railway had been given to adventurers; as Contzen’s successor Hoffmann discovered to his disgust. Complaints of the men not getting the money due to them were so numerous that he decided to pay them himself. Unfortunately he accepted the figures given him by the contractors, and there was trouble at once.

The first man who came to the pay-table had been offered fifteen piastres a day, which was a good wage, and had been working six weeks: he was down in the books as entitled to only six piastres a day. After deductions for bread which he had not had, water which he had got from the river himself, and so on, he was found to be owed only twenty-seven and a half piastres for six weeks’ work. The man protested. Hoffmann’s Circassian guard slashed him across the face with a whip. The man stooped to pick up a stone; his friends, who were Kurds, did the same, and the guard fired. A brisk battle started, stones and a few guns on one side, revolvers on the other. Lawrence and Woolley hearing the noise came up to persuade the men, about seven hundred of them, to cease fire. Lawrence has a gesture which he uses in emergencies of this kind. He lazily raises both hands, clasps them behind his head and remains silent and apparently wrapped in thought. It attracts attention more readily than any noise or violent motion, and when he has his audience quiet all about him he says what is to be said with the gentle, humorous wisdom of an old nurse subduing a noisy schoolroom. The Kurds ceased fire: but the seven Germans did not. They continued to use their revolvers from the hut where they had taken refuge, and the Circassian raised his gun towards Woolley and Lawrence as they came up begging the Germans to stop. The Germans had quite lost their heads and went on firing, though the Kurds were not firing back: it was only with the help of Wahid and a former brigand chief called Hamoudi, that Lawrence and Woolley prevented the whole mass of workmen from rushing down to do massacre. It was more than two hours before the Kurds could be drawn off: then it was found that the Germans only had cuts and bruises to show while the Kurds had eighteen men wounded and one killed.[1]

[1] This account appears in Woolley’s Dead Downs and Living Men: the slight differences in the story are due to emendations by Lawrence.

The Germans had wired for help to Aleppo at the first alarm, saying that their camp was being fired on: the telegram was mistranslated and a special train arrived with the Aleppo Volunteer Fire Brigade, brass helmets and all. After they had been sent back, a detachment of two hundred Turkish soldiers came and was stationed in the German camp. But all railway work ceased for a week because the dead man belonged to a Kurdish clan across the river, and his friends refused to allow the bridge-building to be carried on in their territory. The German Consul at Aleppo finally had to ask the Englishmen to settle the matter between the railway people and the Kurds. Woolley agreed and blood-money was fixed at £120. The German Consul refused, saying that the Germans had acted in self-defence, but he was soon made to see that a tribal matter must be settled by tribal custom. The Kurdish chief agreed to accept the money but only out of favour to the English, and things were patched up: in future the money for the workmen was to be paid to the Kurdish head-men direct from the Company for the payment of the workers, and the chief was to be himself responsible that the work was properly carried on. For these services Lawrence and Woolley were offered Turkish decorations, but refused them.

This ex-brigand chief Hamoudi and a younger man called Dahoum, who was trained by Lawrence as a photographer, came on a visit with him to England. They enjoyed Oxford, particularly the sport of bicycle riding, which was new to them. They had women’s bicycles because of their long robes, and got into trouble for the delight that they took in bicycling round and round the policeman who stands in the centre of ‘Carfax,’ the principal cross-roads of the city. They slept out in the garden. Their one regret was that they could not take the hot-water-taps back with them: Lawrence could not make them understand that these would not work in a Syrian mud-brick village as they did at No. 2 Polstead Road, Oxford. And they would stand in the public lavatories and stroke the white glazed ‘beautiful beautiful bricks.’

Among the women for whom Lawrence has had the greatest respect was the late Miss Gertrude Bell, one of the great English travellers in Arabia before Lawrence’s day. (Among these, by the way, who include Palgrave, Doughty and the Blunts, he does not reckon Sir Richard Burton who, he says, did not travel single-mindedly as the others did, wrote so difficult an English style as to be unreadable, and was both pretentious and vulgar. Among non-English travellers, he speaks highly of Burckhardt and Niebuhr.) Gertrude Bell visited the Carchemish camp one morning in 1911 and since news of her coming had arrived before her, the village was in a great state of excitement. At the time there were only three Englishmen in the camp: Dr. Hogarth who was married, Mr. Campbell-Thompson who was widely known to be engaged, and Lawrence who wore the red tasselled belt to his white flannel shorts which marked the bachelor in those parts. It was decided by the diggers that Gertrude Bell was coming to marry Lawrence and all preparations were made for a festival. When, therefore, she said good-bye the same evening and prepared to go off there was a great clamour. It was thought that she had refused Lawrence and so insulted the village. Lawrence managed to quiet them down by an ungallant but successful lie before stones were thrown and Gertrude Bell, who had been puzzled by the demonstration, never learned the truth until Hogarth told her some years later: it amused her greatly.

There were two digging seasons at Carchemish: between June and September the local harvest claimed the workmen, and between November and March the rains rained and the snow snowed and the Euphrates flooded the lowlands into a marsh. In the off-seasons Lawrence did not usually return to England but wandered instead all over Syria and the Near East studying antiquities, learning Arabic and getting in touch with the members of the various Arab Freedom societies of which an account will be given in the next chapter. He had already begun to take steps for the fulfilment of his schoolboy ambition to help in the Arab Revolt. But his immediate object was to collect information for writing a history of the Crusades. This is another book that he has never found time to write. He did, however, complete a travel-book called ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom,’ later destroyed in manuscript, about seven typical Near-Eastern cities: Cairo, Smyrna, Constantinople, Beyrout, Aleppo, Damascus, Medina.

He was, among other things, a student of world-politics and saw that the alliance between the Turks and the Germans would have dangerous results. The Constantinople-Bagdad railway was part of a German scheme for establishing an Eastern Empire with the Turks as allies. He had already paid a visit to Lord Kitchener pointing out the danger of letting the Germans get control of the port of Alexandretta which is in the crook between Asia Minor and Syria, but Kitchener told him that he knew all about it. He had repeatedly warned the British Foreign Office of the complications that would follow—the French had ambitions for the control of Syria too—but Sir Edward Greys pacific policy allowed no alternative. Kitchener’s final words to Lawrence were that within three years there would be a world-war which would settle this lesser question with a greater. ‘So run along, young man, and dig before it rains.’ It has been said that Lawrence’s way of calling public attention in Europe to the concealed threat to world-peace in the building of the railway that linked Berlin with Bagdad was this: that he loaded sections of drainage pipes on mules and transported them by night to the hills which commanded the bridge; that he mounted them on piles of sand to resemble guns; that, as he expected, the Germans observed them through field-glasses, got excited and wired to Berlin and Constantinople that the British were fortifying the hills; that the European press was excited for days. There is no word of truth in all this comic-paper stuff. To begin with, Lawrence had no drainage pipes at his disposal.

The following are extracts from letters of Lawrence from Carchemish. The first is dated September 1912:

‘To-day is the end of Ramadan, and they are surging in and out of the courtyard firing revolvers, and bringing me portions from the feast going on in the village. I have twelve sheets of bread, wrapping up twelve packets of parched corn, with grapes and cucumbers in abundance. But I can’t yet talk Arabic!

‘There is a splendid dress called “of the seven kings”:—long parallel stripes of the most fiery colours from neck to ankle: it looks glorious: and over that they wear a short blue coat, turned up at the cuffs to show a dull red lining, and they gird themselves with a belt of thirteen vari-coloured tassels, and put a black silk and silver weave of Hamath work over their heads under a black goat-hair head-rope. You have then only to add a vest of gold-embroidered silk, and white under-tunics to get the idea of one man’s dress (I have forgotten Kurd knitted socks in nine primary colours, and red shoes), and there are ninety and nine, all different, eating a sheep before the door!

‘All is well here (after bad waves of cholera and smallpox) and I expect to get back at Christmas.’

The second letter is dated December 1913:

‘I have gradually slipped down, until a few months ago when I found myself an ordinary archæologist. I fought very hard, at Oxford and after going down, to avoid being labelled: but the insurance people have nailed me down, now.... I have got to like this place very much: and the people here—five or six of them—and the whole manner of living pleases me. We have 200 men to play with, anyhow we like so long as the excavations go on, and they are very splendid fellows many of them—I had two of them, head-men, in England with me this summer-and it is great fun with them. Then there are the digs, with dozens of wonderful things to find; and hosts of beautiful things in the villages and towns to fill one’s house with. Not to mention Hittite seal-hunting in the country round about, and the Euphrates to rest in when one is over-hot. It is a place where one eats lotus nearly every day.’

In the winter of 1913 Dr. Hogarth was asked to suggest an archæologist who might join the surveying party in the peninsula of Sinai—the desert between Palestine and Egypt in which Moses kept the Jews wandering until he had made a fighting people of them. He recommended Woolley, but Woolley could not spare the three months that he was wanted for, so he and Lawrence went together for six weeks and divided the work between them. They got on well with the surveyor, Captain Newcombe, an Engineer officer who afterwards was in Arabia with Lawrence, and made important discoveries of ancient remains. They mapped out, not too seriously perhaps, the probable route of the Israelites’ marches and found the place which may have been Kadesh Barnea where Moses struck the rock and water gushed out. They went as far as Petra and Maan in Arabia, places that figured importantly in Lawrence’s campaign four years later. Their report appears in a book called The Wilderness of Sin, published in 1914 by the Palestine Exploration Fund. The survey could not be complete without certain bearings taken at the Red Sea port of Akaba, but the Turks had refused permission, for military reasons. Lawrence told Newcombe that he would go and look at Akaba. He got there without opposition and took what notes he wanted. Then he had a sudden desire to explore the ancient ruins on a little island called Faroun Island which lies a quarter of a mile from the coast. He asked permission to use the one boat that was on the beach. The Turks refused and a large party drew the boat up on the beach so that he could not possibly move it. That did not stop Lawrence. In the middle of the day when all Turkish soldiers go to sleep he made a raft out of three of his large camel water-tanks. These copper tanks hold eighteen gallons apiece and measure about three feet six inches by one foot three inches, and are nine inches deep; they make excellent rafts. The wind took him safely across and he inspected the ruins, but he had difficulty on the return journey. The water was full of sharks, too.

The survey, it should be explained, was ordered by Kitchener for military purposes. But it was disguised as archæology. The Palestine Exploration Fund got permission from the Turks for it and the task of Lawrence and Woolley was, they found on arrival, to provide the archæological excuse for Newcombe’s map-making activities.

II

A brief description of Lawrence:—He is short (five feet, five and a half inches), with his body long, I should judge, in proportion to his legs, for he is more impressive seated than standing. He has a big head of a Norse type, rising steeply at the back. His hair is fair (not blond) and rather fine: his complexion is fair and he could go unshaved longer than most men without showing it. The upper part of his face is kindly, almost maternal; the lower part is severe, almost cruel. His eyes are blue grey and constantly in motion. His hands and feet are small. He is, or was, of great physical strength: he has been seen to raise up a rifle at arm’s length, holding it by the barrel-end, until it was parallel with the ground—yet no one would suspect him of being more than tough. In Arabia he won the respect of the desert fighters by his feats of strength and agility as much as by his other qualities. The pass-test of the highest order of fighters was the feat of springing off a trotting camel and leaping on again with one hand on the saddle and a rifle in the other. It is said that Lawrence passed the test. Of his powers of physical endurance the story will tell.

Here are a few first impressions of Lawrence; difficult to reconcile:—‘That commonplace looking little man!’ (a poet). ‘Face and figure of a Circassian dancing-girl’ (an American journalist-lecturer). ‘A little man with a red face like a butcher’ (Royal Tank Corps). ‘Face like a cheap writing-pad; a proper swede-looking (i.e. bumpkin) chap’ (Royal Air Force). ‘A comical little x—’ (Royal Tank Corps). ‘A young man of considerable physical beauty: it is the sober truth that I have not seen such burnished gold hair before or since, nor such intensely blue eyes’ (a visitor at Carchemish). ‘A very quiet, sedate manner, a fine head but insignificant body’ (a major of the Camel Corps).

He has a trick of holding his hands loosely folded below his breast, the elbows to his sides, and carries his head a little tilted, the eyes on the ground. He can sit or stand for hours at a stretch without moving a muscle. He talks in short sentences, deliberately and quietly without accenting his words strongly. He grins a lot and laughs seldom. He is a dead shot with a pistol and a good rifle-shot. His greatest natural gift is being able to switch off the current of his personality whenever he wishes to be unnoticed in company. He can look heavy and stupid, even vulgar; and uses this power constantly in self-protection. When he first joined the Royal Air Force he was sent one day to nail down carpets under the direction of an Air-Marshal’s wife. She had known him well, but Lawrence to avoid general embarrassment did not wish to be recognized, and so she did not know him. As a matter of fact he is hardly ever recognized in uniform by people who used to know him. The tight collar and peaked cap are a disguise and there is nothing immediately remarkable about his appearance, no irregularity of feature or gesture or carriage. When the current is not switched off there is a curious feeling of force whenever he is in the room, a steady force, not an aimless disturbing one, and the more powerful because it is so well controlled; so that those who do not accept him as a friendly being are apt to fear him. I have even heard it said ‘Lawrence must have direct dealings with the Supernatural.’ This is, however, nonsense. The power is from within and not from without. I have noticed that he dislikes being touched; a hand laid on his shoulder or knee is an offence; he can understand the Oriental notion that ‘virtue’ (he would, I think, call it ‘integrity’) goes out of a man when so touched. He will never shake hands if he can avoid doing so nor will he ever fight hand to hand. He does not drink or smoke. This is not due to deliberate teetotal conviction or because he regards these things as poison, but principally because he has no occasion to drink or smoke. Most people begin drinking and smoking out of mere sociability: Lawrence always avoids sociability of any sort. He is uncomfortable with strangers: this is what is called his shyness. He regards drinking, gluttony, gambling, sport and the passions of love—the whole universe for the average man—as unnecessary; as, at the best, stimulants for the years when life goes flat.

He avoids eating with other people. Regular mealtimes are not to his liking. He hates waiting more than two minutes for a meal or spending more than five minutes on a meal. That is why he lives mainly on bread and butter. And he likes water better than any other drink. It is his opinion that feeding is a very intimate performance and should be done in a small room behind locked doors. He eats, when he does eat, which is seldom, in a casual abstracted way. He came to visit me one breakfast-time on his racing motor-bicycle: he had come about two hundred miles in five hours. He would eat no breakfast. I asked him later what the food was like in the camp. ‘I seldom eat it: it’s good enough. I am now a storeman in the Quartermaster’s stores, so I don’t need much.’ ‘When did you last have a meal?’ I asked. ‘On Wednesday.’ Since when apparently he had some chocolate, an orange and a cup of tea. This was Saturday. Then I think I put some apples near him, and after a while he reached for one. Fruit is his only self-indulgence. (Shelley, by the way, had this casual habit of eating, though he did not thrive on it like Lawrence: and he had Lawrence’s gift of entering and leaving a room unnoticed if he wished.) It is his occasional habit to knock off proper feeding for three days—rarely five—just to make sure that he can do it without feeling worried or strained. One’s sense of things gets very keen by this fasting, he finds, and it is good practice for hard times. His life has been full of hard times.

Lawrence also, when his own master, avoids regular hours of sleep. He has found that his brain works better if he sleeps as irregularly as he eats. In the Royal Air Force he is always in bed at ‘Lights Out’ and sleeps until after midnight. Then he dozes, thinking more or less until reveille. At night, he finds, the minds of others are switched off and that gives his mind longer range, free of their vibrations. He avoids as far as possible all social relationships, all public events. He joins no clubs, societies, groups. He answers few letters but the immediately pressing ones and not always those. On visiting Oxford in 1922 after two months prolonged to six in the East, he found his table stacked with correspondence; perhaps two or three hundred letters. He had given orders to have nothing forwarded. He read them all carefully and sent off a single answer—a telegram: the rest went into the waste-paper basket. Usually he will answer a pre-paid telegram. Or, it would be more true to say, he will use the reply-form, though not necessarily to the sender. He never answers a letter addressed to him as ‘Lawrence’: this warning may save some of my readers money in stamps. When he does write a letter it is not of the sort that finds its way into the waste-paper basket. A Lawrence letter is always practical, considered, full, helpful, informative. This sort of thing ... ‘When you go to Rheims, go alone. Sit down at the base of the sixth pilaster from the west on the south side of the nave aisle and look up between the fourth and fifth pillars at the third window of the clerestory on the north side of the nave....’ (1910).

He is one of the rare people who have a sensible attitude towards money. He neither loves it nor fears it, for he has found it useless to help on the two or three occasions when he has greatly desired things worth while. He can be a financier if and when it pleases him: for the most part he is not bothered about his bank-balance. At the moment he has no bank-balance at all, and has taken great care not to make a penny out of any of his writings on the Arab Revolt. Apart from this he has done his best to earn money with his pen, and has made £35 in four years’ anonymous effort. He calls these earnings the jam on his Royal Air Force bread and butter. He writes with great difficulty and corrects much; and takes no pride or pleasure in anything that he has written. Most of these earnings are from translation-work and none of them from creative or original writing. He never intends to write another real book. He usually writes, by the way, in indian ink because it makes a good mark on the page. His handwriting is unpretentious and at first sight almost schoolboyish; but always legible. It varies very much with his mood, from large and square to small and narrow, from upright to a slight backward slant. I believe that the one thing that he likes is to find some one who knows more than himself or can do something better than himself. To such a person he will attach himself and learn all that is to be learned. And if he meets someone who can actually think faster or more accurately than himself and can even anticipate him in his apparently erratic but most carefully considered behaviour, so much the better. At the same time he has a savage conviction of his own general insufficiency which he will not allow to be contradicted by particular occasions on which he has been proved to excel others. It is not modesty but a sincere faith in his own unworthiness suggesting the cries in the Church Litany and will not stand contradiction.

Perhaps his most unexpected personal characteristic is that he never looks at a man’s face and never recognizes a face. This is inherited; his father one day stepped on his toe in the street and passed on with an apology, not knowing him. He would not recognize his mother or his brothers, even, if he met them without warning. Long practice has made Lawrence able to talk for twenty minutes at a time to whoever accosts him without betraying that he hasn’t a notion who the person is. Yet he can remember names and details of taste and character, and words and opinions and places vividly and at great length. He does his best to see people; but is constantly getting into trouble for not recognizing and saluting officers when they are out of uniform; for nobody is willing to believe his excuses.

He has never been dogmatic about any creed or political conviction: he has no belief in a philosophic Absolute. He has no use for crowds or any person whose only strength is that he is a member of some society or creed. He clearly also expects people to find themselves and be true to themselves, and to leave their neighbours to do the same: he would wish every man to be an everlasting question-mark. He can be relentless to the point of cruelty: the shock of his anger, which is a cold quiet laughing anger, is violent. To hear him, say, dismissing an impostor who claims to have served during the War in the East in such and such a unit, or reminding a bully of men deliberately sent to their death by him in such and such a province, is a terrifying experience. But when the offender is gone, the anger goes too and leaves no trace.

Lawrence does not like children (or dogs or camels) in mass, in the usual sentimental way. He likes a few children (as also a few dogs, a few camels). From the rest he shrinks. He is afraid of them, and he is sorry for them, as for creatures forced, without having their wishes consulted, into an existence in which, if they are good creatures, they will necessarily find disappointment. This will not prevent him at times from talking really to a child, treating it as an independent person and not merely as a clever echo of its parents.

He has, it seems, no use for the human race as such or interest in its continuance. He has no sentimentality about universal brotherhood, like Swift; he has no use for the works of men. And has come to this view, I think, by the same road as Swift, by an overwhelming sense of personal liberty, a largeness of heart, and an intense desire for perfection so obviously unattainable as hardly to be worth starting for.

We may conclude that when, in 1922, his dislike of the crowd became too strong and he saw that it was becoming a definite limitation for him, when he found in fact after the apparent triumph of the Arabian adventure that in avoiding the mask of a popular hero he was withdrawing more and more and becoming unwholesomely interested in just being himself, he took a violent course-he enlisted and bound himself to a life in which he was forced perpetually to be a member of the crowd. The Army and Air Force are the modern equivalent of the monastery, and after five years he does not regret his choice of a life as nearly physical as an animal’s, in which food is provided, and drink, and a round of work in harness and a stable afterwards until the new day brings a repetition of the work of yesterday.

‘AIRCRAFTMAN SHAW’ in ‘Scruff order’

Copyright

What is called Lawrence’s ‘love of publicity’ can best be explained as a burning desire to know himself, for no one can be himself except by first knowing himself. To publicity in the sense of what is published about him he is indifferent; he is never more than amused at what he has read about himself. But it ceases to be amusing to him when he meets people who believe all they read about him and act as if legend was truth. He denies the legend, and they say ‘how modest these heroes are’: and he is nearly sick. He does not believe that heroes exist or ever have existed; he suspects them all of being frauds. If he is interested at times in what people may think of him this is only because their opinion may show him what sort of a man he is more clearly than any amount of self-examination can. He has been often accused of vanity because he has sat for his portrait to so many artists and sculptors—he has only four times refused to sit—but it is the opposite of vanity. A vain man has a very clear view of himself which he tries to force on his neighbours. Lawrence sits for his portrait because he wants to discover what he is, by the effect which he produces on the artist: so far from being vain he clearly has no picture of himself at all except a contemptuous one. He accepts the view that he is a complete humbug and play actor; chiefly, perhaps, because people who are themselves humbugs and actors see him so in their own likeness.

He has another reason for ‘sitting’ and that is because artists (in the wider sense) are the only class of human beings to which he would like to belong. He can salve the regret that, rightly or wrongly, he feels at not being a true artist, by watching artists work and providing them with a model. He has done a good deal of experimental sculpture; he told me once that somewhere, I think in Syria, there are twelve life-size statues left by him on the roof of a house. Certainly some of the decorations outside a nonconformist chapel in the Iffley Road at Oxford are his work, but unsigned and indistinguishable from the rest. I have seen silversmith work by him. He has written poems, but they fall short of his intentions more seriously even than his handicrafts, because poetry has more freedom possible to it than these. Lawrence’s chief curse is that he cannot stop thinking, and by thinking I mean a working of the mind that is not mere calculation from any given set of facts, but a much more intense and difficult process which makes its own facts and tests them as it goes and destroys them when it is over. In all my acquaintance I know no more than three people who really think, and these three include Lawrence. He seems to be perpetually stretching his mind in every direction and finding little or nothing; ‘lunging about,’ as an Arab poet said, ‘like a blind camel in the dark.’ At least the effort seems to make the mind harder and fitter.

But this account is getting too philosophical, and the simplest conclusion about Lawrence is the best. It is not that ‘He is a great man.’ The greatness of his achievement is in any case historical. He, a foreigner and an unbeliever, inspired and led the broadest national movement of the Arabs that had taken place since the great times of Mohammed and his early successors, and brought it to a triumphant conclusion. It is not that he is a genius. This has come to be a vulgar almost meaningless word, attached to any competent scientist or fiddler or verse-maker or military leader. It is not even that he is an ‘erratic genius,’ unless ‘erratic’ means that Lawrence does not do the usual things that men of successful talents do; the ordinary vulgar things that are expected by the crowd. If Napoleon, for instance, who was a vulgar rather than an ‘erratic’ genius, had been in Lawrence’s position at the close of the 1918 campaign he would have proclaimed himself a Mohammedan and consolidated the new Arabian Empire. Lawrence did nothing of the sort, though he had popularity and power enough perhaps to make himself Emperor even without an official change of faith. But it would have been foolish to expect a man who has qualities that shine in difficult weather to subdue them in calm weather. He came away and left the Arabs to employ the freedom that he had given them, a freedom unencumbered by his rule which, however just and wise, would always have been an alien rule. He would have contradicted himself had he suffered all those pains to free the Arabs and then enslaved them under himself. The trouble with him often is that he is too sane. He is impish at times but never erratic; he does nothing without good reason, though his decisions may disappoint the crowd. There was nothing erratic about Lawrence when he enlisted as an airman in 1922. When I heard of it first it did not surprise me: one learns not to be surprised at anything Lawrence does. My only comment was ‘He knows his own needs,’ and now I can see clearly that it was the most honourable thing to himself that he could have done. It was, moreover, a course that he had decided on in 1919 and had suggested to Air-Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond before the Armistice. But not till Mr. Winston Churchill had given the Arabs what Lawrence considered a fair deal was he free to please himself. Politics accounted for the three years’ delay.

The least and most that can be said about Lawrence is that he is a good man. This ‘good’ is something that can be understood by a child or a savage or any simple-minded person. It is just a feeling that you get from him, the feeling ‘here is a man with great powers, a man who could make most men do for him exactly whatever he desired, but yet one who would never use his powers, from respect for the other man’s personal freedom.’

Popular suggestions made lately for employing Lawrence’s talents or genius have been as numerous and varied as they have been ridiculous. The public has taken an interest in him that almost amounts to a claim for ownership: but nobody owns Lawrence or will ever own him. He is not a public Niagara that can be harnessed for any political or commercial purpose. A Colonial Governor-Generalship? What sort of appointment is that for a man who might have been an Emperor? And imagine Lawrence, who has long come to the point of disbelieving in his existence and every one else’s, laying foundation stones and attending ceremonial parades and banquets! Lawrence, shortly after the War ended, was invited to attend the reception after a society wedding. He went (a man he liked was being married) in company with a young diplomatic attaché who was much impressed by the occasion. ‘What name, gentlemen?’ asked the flunkey at the door. Lawrence saw his companion pulling himself-together for an impressive entrance and the spirit of mischief overcame him. ‘Messrs. Lenin and Trotsky,’ he said quickly. And ‘Mr. Lenin, Mr. Trotsky!’ the flunkey bawled out mechanically to the scandalized assembly: which, indeed, included Royalty.

Another suggestion has been that Lawrence should be entrusted with a mission to settle affairs in China. If Lawrence had any desire to settle affairs in China, even supposing that he felt himself capable of doing so, which is doubtful (it is quite possible that he is ignorant of Chinese), he would certainly demand an absolutely free hand. And it is then possible, indeed probable, that the solution he would provide would be one not at all favourable to European control of Chinese affairs. In any case, he had done this sort of thing once already: one does not repeat unpleasant experiences, for hire, without conviction, unless one has that sense of patriotic duty of which Lawrence is completely free. Other silly suggestions have been that he should edit a modern literary review, that he should be given an appointment in connexion with the Mesopotamian oil-fields, that he should be made director-general of British Army training or given a high post at the British Museum. All these suggestions remind one of the various methods detailed in mediæval books under the heading ‘how to catch and tame a Unicorn.’ People do not seem to realize that he knows himself pretty well and that he has chosen to serve in the Royal Air Force, which is not a life that comes easily or naturally to him, for a full engagement. He finds its difficulty worth coping with and is content. If he wants to do anything else he will do so without prompting.

It is remarkable that the most popular suggestion has been that Lawrence should head a great religious revival. In view of my conclusion about Lawrence that he can best be described simply as a ‘good man’ there may seem to be something in that suggestion. But it is as foolish as the rest. In the first place Lawrence has read too much theology to be a simple, successful revivalist and does not believe that religions can be ‘revived’, but only invented. In the second, he would not think of using his personality for any new popular campaign, military or religious, ever again. His nihilism is a chilly creed, the first article of which is ‘thou shalt not convert!’ In the third place....

But enough. Mr. George Bernard Shaw perhaps made the most practical suggestion, that Lawrence should be given a government pension and chambers in some public building (he mentioned Blenheim Palace) and be allowed to spend his time exactly as it suited him. But I think that Lawrence would be unwilling to accept even a gift like this; such an arrangement would put him under a shadowy obligation to the public and, anyhow, he does not believe that he is worth anyone’s paying. Also he might have æsthetic objections to Blenheim Palace. Also someone else already lives there. The only suggestion that I can make for the future treatment of Lawrence is simply this: that he should be left alone to maintain that rare personal liberty which so very few people are capable of maintaining.

Most of what I have written is more or less in Lawrence’s favour. What is the worst that can be said against him? A great many things, perhaps, but they have mostly been said by Lawrence himself at one time or another. In the first place, he is an incurable romantic and that means that he is on doubtful terms with all institutions which claim to preserve public stability. He has loved adventure for its own sake, and the weaker side because it is the weaker side, and the lost cause, and unhappiness. Now, the incurable romantic is approved by society only if he is incompetent and fails, gloriously perhaps, but conspicuously, and so proves that the stupid ordinary people who control public security are always right after all. Lawrence’s romanticism is not incompetent, it is not unsuccessful. When a European monarch one day in 1919 greeted him with the remark, ‘It is a bad time for us kings. Five new republics were proclaimed yesterday,’ Lawrence was able to answer, ‘Courage, sir! We have just made three kingdoms in the East.’

For the real success of his romanticism—a romanticism which, as in the ‘Winston’ settlement of the Middle East, the big achievement of his life for which the War was a mere preparation, comes uncomfortably near realism—he is naturally very much hated by most government officials, regular soldiers, old-fashioned political experts and such-like; he is a disturbing element in their ordered scheme of things, a mystery and a nuisance. Even now, as a mechanic in the Air Force, he is a worry. They suspect some diabolic trick for raising mutiny or revolt. They refuse to believe that he is simply there because he is there. That he wants to be quit of affairs and become politically and intellectually unemployable.

Again, he is not even a single-minded romantic: he clearly despises his romanticism and fights it in himself so sternly that he only makes it more incurable. People like Lawrence are in fact an obvious menace to civilization; they are too strong and important to be dismissed as nothing at all, too capricious to be burdened with a position of responsibility, too sure of themselves to be browbeaten, but then too doubtful of themselves to be made heroes of.

The only original thing—if it is original—that I can say against Lawrence—if it is against him—is this: he keeps his enormously wide circle of friends, who range from tramps to reigning sovereigns and Air-Marshals, as much as possible in watertight compartments, each away from the other. Towards each friend he turns a certain character which he keeps for that relationship and which is consistent with it. To each friend he reveals in fact some part of himself, but only a part: these characters he never confuses. So there are many thousands of Lawrences, each one a facet of the Lawrence crystal: and whether or not the crystal is colourless and the facets merely reflect the characters of the friends whom they face, Lawrence himself has no notion. He has no intimates to whom the whole might be shown. The result of this dispersion—his friends are not casually made but chosen out, representing various departments of art, life, science, study (and he has an especial tenderness for ruffians)—is that such of his friends as are of a possessive nature try to corner him, each believing that he alone knows the real Lawrence, so that there is a comical jealousy when they meet. This may be also partly due to Lawrence being a person about whom it is easier to feel than to speak. One cannot put him into words—I cheerfully own to failure—because he is so various, because he has no single characteristic or humour that one could swear to. So his friends resent every description of him that they hear and cannot give one of their own to justify their resentment. Hence, probably, their possessive secrecy.

In getting together material for this book I have had more than one rebuff from friends who have carefully treasured some personal relation with which they thought themselves uniquely favoured. In spite of rebuffs I have tried to get bearings on Lawrence from as many angles, friendly and hostile, as possible: and if the only Lawrence that I still can see is the facet that he has consistently presented to me in the seven years that I have known him—well, let it be so: if it is only a Lawrence and not the Lawrence, it is nevertheless more plausible than most supposedly complete individuals that I know.

I would not offer Lawrence, nor most certainly would he offer himself, or consider himself, as a model of conduct, or as a philosophic system. Circumstances and his own lifelong efforts have made him more free of human ties than other men. He can therefore dispose of himself in any market at any given time. Others cannot; they have careers, ambitions, families, wants, hopes, fears, traditions, duties—all binding them to that organized human society in which Lawrence seems to play only an accidental and perfunctory part. It is this extraordinary detachment, this final insulation of himself, which makes him the object of so much curiosity, suspicion, exasperation, admiration, love, hatred, jealousy, legends, lies. He has resolutely and painfully adopted the attitude towards organized society, ‘you go your way and I’ll go mine,’ ‘leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone,’ but organized society cannot control itself in its hue-and-cry after a lost lamb that is perversely in need of no crook or fold. It is perhaps the triumph of his detachment that one can write of him in this way, as if he were a character in ancient history, confident that whatever one writes will not affect the man himself in the least, that his check will be only on infringements of copyrights that are no longer entirely his own.

For all that, he has not been able to keep himself to himself in one rather serious respect. Wherever he goes and makes his presence felt he seems to leave behind, probably unconsciously and certainly unwillingly, a number of fictitious Lawrences, people who seek to get something of the man’s power by a mere imitation of what happen to be at the time his outward peculiarities. An affected lack of ease in society, an affected self-withdrawal, an inclined carriage of the head, a deliberate economy of gesture and vocabulary, a peculiar dragging of the words yes and no, a lack of emphasis at the moments of arrival and departure—whenever I meet these, I know that the Lawrence legend is stalking about, a ghost as persuasive, as destructive, as false as the Byron legends of a hundred years ago. Lawrence has a right to be Lawrence; he is his own peculiar invention. But at second and third hand he is occasionally comic, as when some ambitious, conventional, sporting, self-indulgent lion tries on his unicorn skin. But more often it goes beyond the comic stage: strong silent little men are even more insufferable than strong silent big ones. And by a cosmic joke in the worst taste the legend of ‘The Uncrowned King of Arabia’ has become popularly entangled with a novelist’s myth of ‘The Sheik of Araby.’ Booksellers have wasted a good deal of time in explaining that ‘Revolt in the Desert’ is not a sequel to ‘The Son of the Sheik.’

Now, the difficulty of writing a definite summary of what Lawrence is or was at any given time is that he makes a point of keeping his opinions and desires as far as possible in a state of solution; he prevents them, that is, from crystallizing into a motive that will affect the opinions, desires and actions of other men. When, in spite of all precautions, a motive does appear, a force is generated that is nearly irresistible, and while this lasts he stands out with glaring distinctness as a figure in history. But his greatness or power or whatever one may call it, though popularly revealed on such occasions, results apparently from his negative policy of being sure of nothing, believing nothing, caring for nothing, all the rest of the time. And with this paradox my study must end.

III

Lawrence once attended on the Emir Feisal, the chief Arab leader of the Revolt, when he was privately received at Buckingham Palace. Lawrence was wearing Arabian dress; the white robe, the belt, the dagger, the silk and gold head-dress, and was rebuked by a person of importance: ‘Is it right, Colonel Lawrence, that a subject of the Crown and an officer too, should appear here clothed in foreign uniform?’ He answered respectfully but firmly, ‘When a man serves two masters and has to offend one of these, it is better for him to offend the more powerful. I am here as official interpreter of the Emir Feisal, whose uniform this is.’ Lawrence’s problem, whether his loyalty lay towards the Arabs or towards England when England and the Arabs were in conflict, was the most difficult problem of his life. England could claim earlier rights of allegiance—he was for two years a British army officer before he began the Arabian adventure—while his natural instinct to side with the weaker cause inclined him to press the Arab claim even against the interests of British Imperial expansion. When further it seemed that the right lay on the side of the Arabs rather than on that of his own country he was even more divided in mind.

How he came to be in this position cannot be shown without a short chapter of history and geography. The first thing to be explained is what is meant by ‘The Arabs.’ The Arabs are not merely the inhabitants of the country called Arabia: the word includes all those Eastern races which speak the language called Arabic. The Arabic language is spoken over an area as big as India, lying between a line formed by the extreme eastern coast of the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, and a second line farther east parallel with it formed by the River Tigris and the Persian Gulf as far as Muscat on the Indian Ocean. This rough parallelogram of land, which is much longer than it is wide, includes Syria, Palestine, Transjordania, Mesopotamia and the whole of the Arabian Peninsula. The people who live in it are called Semites, the children of Shem. The Semites were cousins by blood even before they were given a common religious language, Arabic, by Mohammed’s conquests and his Koran. Arabic, Assyrian, Babylonian, Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac, the principal Semitic languages, are all related to each other rather than to the languages of African Ham or Indo-European Japhet. Into this Semite country many foreign peoples have from time to time forced a way, but none have kept a footing for long. Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans and Franks (the Crusaders) have in turn tried, but their colonies have gradually been destroyed or swallowed up by the Semites. The Semites have themselves sometimes ventured out of their area and in turn been drowned in the outer world. France, Spain and Morocco to the west, India to the east, were reached in the great days of the Mohammedan conquests. But with few scattered exceptions the Semites have never been able to live outside their old area without changing their natures and customs.

THE ARAB AREA

This Semite country has many different climates and soils. On the west is a long range of mountains running all the way from Alexandretta in Northern Syria, through Palestine and the land of Midian till it reaches Aden in Southern Arabia. It has an average height of two or three thousand feet, is well watered and well populated. On the east is Mesopotamia, a plain lying between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, its soil one of the most fertile in the world, and below Mesopotamia another but infertile plain stretching from Kuweit along the Arabian side of the Persian Gulf. On the south there is a long range of hills facing the Indian Ocean, which supports a fair population. But these outer fringes of watered country frame an enormous waste of thirsty desert, much of it still unexplored. In the heart of the desert in Central Arabia there is a large group of well-watered and populous oases. To the south of these oases is a great sand desert stretching to the inhabited hills which line the Indian Ocean: it is impassable to caravans for lack of water and cuts off these Southern hills from true Arabian history. East of the oases, between them and Kuweit, the eastern limit, is a desert of gravel with some stretches of sand which make travelling difficult. To the west of the oases, between them and the populated western hills which line the Red Sea, is a desert of gravel and lava with not much sand in it. To the north, a belt of sand and then an immense gravel and lava plain filling up everything between the eastern edge of Syria and the banks of the Euphrates where Mesopotamia begins. It is over the western and northern deserts that Lawrence did most of his fighting.

The hills of the west and the plains of the east are the most active parts of the Arabic area, though being more exposed to foreign influence and trade, whether European or Asiatic, the Arabs there are not so typically Semitic in character as the inhabitants of the deserts and of the central oases protected by the desert. It was on the desert tribes that Lawrence depended most for military help in the Arab Revolt, and it was the Arabs of the northern Syrian desert to whom for personal reasons he was most anxious to give freedom. Lawrence has described the process by which the desert tribes come into being. The south-western corner of Arabia, south of the holy city of Mecca, is called Yemen. It is a fertile agricultural district famed for coffee but much overpopulated: and for the surplus population there is no easy outlet. To the north is Mecca, where a strong foreign population drawn from all the Mohammedan world jealously bars the way. To the west is the sea and across the sea lies only the Sudanese desert. South is the Indian Ocean. The only way out is east. So the weaker tribes on the Yemen border are constantly pushed out into the bad lands, where farming becomes less and less easy, and farther out still until they become pastoral and finally are forced into the actual desert. There they work about from oasis to oasis perhaps for several generations until they may be strong enough to establish themselves again as agricultural Arabs in Syria or Mesopotamia. This, writes Lawrence, is the natural circulation that keeps Arabia healthy.

The great deserts are not, as might be supposed, the common property of all the Arab tribes to wander about in according to their pleasure. The territories are strictly divided up between the various tribes and clans, who may graze their camels and flocks only in their own pastures. Thus any clan new to the desert must either fight or pay tribute to maintain itself in any fixed territory. It may pass through and be given free hospitality, but after three days the journey must be renewed. As if the natural hardships of desert life were not enough, the old-established desert tribes are at constant feud with each other, and until the Arab Revolt began had no common thought or motive. (There are moreover outlaws, men with no tribe, who rob and kill any man they meet.) The Bedouin’s curse has always been the curse of Ishmael, to have his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him. Yet on the whole he keeps to a very strict code of honour in his tribal warfare. The two most important cities in Arabia are the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Mecca is about fifty miles inland, about half-way down the Red Sea: Jiddah is its port. Medina, two hundred and fifty miles to the north of Mecca, is about one hundred and fifty miles inland behind the range of hills. Every year for more than a thousand years there has been a great pilgrimage to these cities from all over the Mohammedan world. The most famous route is from Damascus in Syria, twelve hundred miles south across the Arabian deserts. Until recently this was a painful journey on foot or camel back, from which thousands of pilgrims, mostly old men who made this pilgrimage as the final religious act of their life, used never to return. One of the chief sources of wealth for the desert tribes was then this yearly pilgrimage. They sold food and animals to the pilgrims and were paid for the caravan’s safe passage through each tribe’s territory. If the money, however, was not paid they would raid the caravan and cut off and rob the stragglers. The Bedouin Arab had a great contempt for the pilgrims, mostly townsmen from Syria and Turkey, and regarded them as his natural prey. A railway was at last built from Damascus to Medina, and the pilgrims were able, just before the outbreak of the War, to set out in reasonable hope of a safe return. There only remained the stretch between Medina and Mecca not yet linked by a railway. The Damascus-Medina railway was built for the Turks by German engineers. The pretext for building it was a pious one; the real reason was to give Abdul Hamid, the Sultan, access for his troops to the Holy Cities, other than by the Suez Canal.

The Turks, like the Arabs, need some explanation. They are not of the race of Shem but visitors from Central Asia; they were late converts to Mohammedanism as the Prussians to Christianity, and made their home in Anatolia, in Asia Minor. They are, like the Prussians, before anything else a fighting people. They are dull, brutal and enduring: their chief virtue is the soldierly one of united action against their neighbours, whom they divide and conquer like the Romans. After the first exciting days of Mohammedan conquest, when the Arabs overran half the known world, the huge new empire had to be knit together. The Arabs had no ruling power themselves and had to rely on the non-Semitic peoples whom they had conquered to provide a system of government. This was the opportunity of the Turks. They were first the servants, then the helpers, then the rulers of the Arab races. Finally they became tyrants and burned and destroyed everything that annoyed their soldier-minds by its beauty or superiority. They robbed the Arabs of their richest possessions and gave them nothing in return. They were not even great road-makers and bridge-builders and marsh-drainers like the Romans. They neglected public works and were the enemies of art, literature and ideas.

The Arabs by their early conquests in Spain and Sicily had been really helpful to European civilization in the Dark Ages: the Arabic origin of many early scientific terms is a reminder of the refreshment that Arab thought provided. True, they were imitative rather than creative, and the ideas that they brought were merely the remnants of Classical learning caught from the Greek city of Alexandria in Egypt before it died. But compared with the Turks they have always seemed cultured, prosperous, even progressive. Turkish rule was a parasite growth, strangling the Empire as ivy strangles a tree. It was cunning at setting subject communities at each other’s throats, and teaching them that the local politics of a province were more important than nationality. The Turks gradually banished the Arabic language from courts, offices, the Government service and superior schools. Arabs might only serve the State, now a mere Turkish Empire, by becoming imitation Turks.

There was of course great resistance to this tyranny. Many revolts took place in Syria, Mesopotamia and Arabia; but the Turks were too strong. The Arabs lost their racial pride and all their proud traditions. But of one thing they could not be robbed, the Koran, the sacred book of all Mohammedans, to study which was every man’s first religious duty, whether Arab or Turk. Not only was the Koran the foundation of the legal system used throughout the Arabic-speaking world, except where the Turks had lately imposed their more Western code, but it was the finest example of Arabic literature. In reading the Koran every Arab had a standard by which to judge the dull minds of his Turkish masters. And the Arabs did succeed in keeping their rich and flexible language, and actually in filling the crude Turkish with Arabic words.

The last Sultan of Turkey, Abdul Hamid, who reigned during the first few years of this century, went even further than those before him. He was jealous of the power of the Arab Grand Sherif of Mecca, who was the head of the priestly family of sherifs (or men descended from the prophet Mohammed) and ruled with great honour in the Holy City.[2] Previous Turkish Sultans finding the Sherif of Mecca too strong to be destroyed had saved their own dignity by solemnly confirming in power whatever Sherif was elected by his family, which numbered about two thousand persons. But Abdul Hamid, who, for autocratic reasons, laid new stress on his inherited title of Caliph or Ruler of the Faithful (the orthodox Mohammedans), wanted the Holy Cities to be under his direct rule; until now he had been safely able to garrison them with soldiers only by means of the Suez Canal. He decided to build the pilgrims’ railway and to increase Turkish influence among the tribes of Arabia by money, intrigue, and armed expeditions. Finally, not content with interfering with the Sherif’s rule even in Mecca itself, he even took away important members of the Prophet’s family to Constantinople, as hostages for the good behaviour of the rest.

[2] Mr. Lowell Thomas has described Lawrence as a Sherif of Mecca. This is plainly ridiculous. Whatever mixed blood Lawrence has in him he certainly is not a pedigreed descendant of the Prophet. He has never been to Mecca and would not offend the Arabs by so doing.

Among these captives were Hussein, the future Sherif, and his four sons, Ali, Abdulla, Feisal and Zeid, who are important in this story. Hussein gave his sons a modern education at Constantinople and the experience which afterwards helped them as leaders of the Arab revolt against the Turks. But he also kept them good Mohammedans and when he returned to Mecca took good care to cure them of any Western softness. He sent them out into the desert in command of the Sherifian troops that guarded the pilgrim road between Medina and Mecca, and kept them there for months at a time.

IV

Four years before the War, Abdul Hamid was deposed by a political party known as the Young Turks. The Young Turks believed in Western political ideas learned from the American schools founded in Turkey, and in military methods learned from their advisers, the Germans; but French culture and government gave them their clearest model to imitate. They objected to Abdul Hamid’s idea of a religious empire ruled by a Sultan who was both head of the State and spiritual ruler. They favoured the Western idea of a military state—Turkey—ruling its subject races merely by the sword, with religion a matter of less importance. As part of this policy they sent Hussein and his family back to Mecca. This nationalist movement in Turkey was really one of self-protection. Already Western ideas about the rights of subject races to govern themselves had begun to crumble up the Turkish Empire. The Greeks, Serbs, Bulgars, Persians and others had broken away and set up their own governments. It was time for the Turks to protect what was left by adopting the same nationalist policy.

After their first success against the Sultan the Young Turks began to behave foolishly. They preached ‘Turkish brotherhood’; meaning no more than to rally together all men of Turkish blood. Turkey should be the absolute mistress of a subject empire in the modern French style; not merely the chief state of a religious Empire only bound together by the Arabic language and the Koran. They also hoped to get back into their state the Turkish population which was at the time under Russian rule in Central Asia. But the subject races, who far outnumbered the Turks, did not understand this. Seeing that the Turks even in their own country were dependent on Greeks, Albanians, Bulgarians, Persians and others for the running of all their government offices and doing all their business except the simple military part, they thought that the Young Turks meant to have an Empire something like the white part of the British Empire, one in which Turkey was to be the head of a number of free states, self-governed but contributing to the general expenses of the Empire. The Young Turks saw their mistake and immediately made their intentions quite plain. Led by Enver, the son of the late Sultan’s chief furniture-maker, and a soldier-politician who had worked his way up, it was said, by murdering in turn every superior officer who stood in his way, they stopped at nothing. The Armenians began to take up arms for freedom. The Turks crushed them—the Armenian leaders failed their followers—and massacred men, women and children in hundreds of thousands. They massacred them not because they were Christians but because they were Armenians and wanted to be independent. Such wholesale barbarity was made possible for Enver and his friends by the nature of the Turkish private soldier, who has been described as the best natural soldier in the world. This means that he is brave, enduring and so obedient that he allows himself to have no feelings except those that he is ordered to have. He will butcher and burn even in his own country if so ordered, and will be merciful and affectionate if so ordered. He merely tries to do his duty.

The Arabs, who had also begun to talk of freedom, were more difficult to deal with because more numerous and because being (unlike the Armenians) Semites they were more powerfully affected by the idea. For Semites can be swung on an idea as on a cord (the phrase is Lawrence’s). The Syrian Arabs, since they were nearest to Europe, first caught fire, and the Young Turks took what measures they dared to take short of massacre. The Arab members of the Turkish Congress were scattered, Arab political societies were suppressed. The public use of the Arabic language except for strictly religious purposes was forbidden all over the Empire. Any talk of Arab self-government was a punishable offence. As a result of this oppression, secret societies sprang up of a more violently revolutionary kind. One of these, the Syrian society, was numerous, well organized, and kept its secret so well that the Turks, though they had suspicions, could not find any clear evidence of its leaders or membership, and without evidence dared not begin another reign of terror of the Armenian kind for fear of European opinion. Another society was composed almost entirely of Arab officers serving in the Turkish army, who were sworn to turn against their masters as soon as a chance offered. This society was founded in Mesopotamia and was so fanatically pro-Arab that its leaders would not even have dealings with the English, French and Russians, who might otherwise have been their allies, because they did not believe that if they accepted European help they would be allowed to keep any freedom that they might win. They preferred a single bad tyranny which they knew well to a possible new tyranny of several nations whom they did not know so well; and at the end of the War members of the society were still commanding Turkish divisions against the English. The Syrian society, however, looked for help to England, to Egypt, to the Sherif of Mecca, to anyone in fact who would do the Arabs’ work for them.

These freedom societies grew until in 1914 the War broke out: then European opinion did not matter much and the Turks, with the power given them by the general mobilization of the Army, could act. Nearly one-third of the original Turkish Army was Arabic-speaking, and after the first few months of the War when they had recognized the danger the Turks took good care to send Arab regiments as far away as possible from their homes, to the northern battle fronts, and there put them into the firing line as quickly as possible. But before this, a few Syrian revolutionaries were found to have been appealing to France for help in their campaign for freedom, and here was an excuse for a reign of terror. Arab Mohammedans and Arab Christians were crowded into the same prisons, and by the end of 1915 the whole of Syria was united by a cause that suppression only made stronger.

Early in the same year the Young Turks were convinced by arguments and pressure from the part of their German Allies that in order to win their war, which was pressing them very hard, they must work up some religious enthusiasm, proclaim a Holy War. In spite of their former decision to give religion an unimportant position in the empire, Holy War was necessary for more than one reason; they wanted the support of the religious party in Turkey; they wanted their soldiers, now badly fed and badly equipped, to fight bravely in the confidence of going straight to Paradise if they were killed; and they also wanted to encourage Mohammedan soldiers in the French and British armies to throw down their arms. In India particularly, such a proclamation was expected to have an immense effect. The Holy War was therefore proclaimed at Constantinople and the Sherif of Mecca was invited, or rather ordered, to confirm the proclamation.

If Hussein had done so the course of the War might have been very different. But he did not wish to take the step. He hated the Turks, whom he knew for bad Mohammedans without honour or good feelings, and he believed that a true Holy War could only be a defensive one, and this was clearly aggressive. Besides, Germany, a Christian ally, made a Holy War look absurd. He refused.

Hussein was shrewd, honourable and deeply pious. His position, however, was difficult. The yearly pilgrimage ended with the outbreak of war and with it went a great part of his revenues. As he was for the Allies an enemy subject, there was danger of their stopping the usual food-ships from India. And if he angered the Turks they might stop food from coming to him by the desert railway; and his own province could not grow food enough for its population. So having refused to proclaim the Holy War he begged the Allies not to starve his people out for what was not their fault. The Turks, in reply to his refusal, began a partial blockade of Hussein’s province by controlling the traffic on the railway. The British, on the other hand, allowed the food vessels to come as usual. This decided Hussein. He decided to revolt (as his neighbour Ibn Saud of the central oases had successfully done four or five years previously) and had a secret meeting with a party of British officers on a deserted reef on the Red Sea coast near Mecca. He was given assurance that England would give him what help he needed in guns and stores for his war. He had also just been secretly asked for his support by leaders of both secret societies, the Syrian and the Mesopotamian. A military mutiny was proposed in Syria. Hussein undertook to do his best for them. He therefore sent Feisal, his third son, to report to him from Syria what were the chances of a successful revolt.

Feisal, who had been a member of the Turkish Government and was therefore able to travel about freely, went and reported that prospects were good in Syria, but that the war in general was going against the Allies; the time was not yet. If, however, the Australian divisions then in Egypt were landed, as was expected, at Alexandretta in Syria, a military mutiny of the Arab divisions then stationed in Syria would certainly be successful. The Arabs could make a quick peace with the Turks, securing their freedom, and after this even if Germany won the world-war they might hold what they had won.

But he was not in touch with Allied politics. The French were afraid that if British forces were once landed in Syria, they would never leave it; and Syria was a country in which they were themselves interested. A joint French and British expedition would not have been so bad, but the French had no troops to spare. So, as it has been responsibly stated, the French Government put pressure on the British to cancel their arrangements for the Alexandretta landing. After much delay the Australians were landed with numerous other British and Indian troops and a small French detachment to give an Allied colouring, not in Syria, but the other side of Asia Minor, at the Dardanelles. It was an attempt, nearly successful, to capture Constantinople and so end the eastern war at a blow. After the landing the English asked Hussein to begin his revolt; on Feisal’s advice he replied that the Allies must first put a screen of troops between him and Constantinople; the English, however, were no longer able to find troops for a landing in Syria even with French consent.

THE EMIR FEISAL
and his Negro Freedmen

Copyright

Feisal went up to the Dardanelles to watch how things went. After several months the Turkish army, though successful in holding its position, had been crippled by enormous losses. Feisal, seeing this, returned to Syria, thinking that the time was at last come for the mutiny, even without Allied help. But there he found that the Turks had broken up all the Arab divisions, sending them to the various distant war-fronts; and his Syrian revolutionary friends were all either under arrest or in hiding, and numbers had already been hanged on various political charges. He had lost his opportunity.

He wrote to his father to wait until England grew stronger and Turkey still weaker. Unfortunately England, quite apart from the difficulties of the Entente, was in a very bad position in the Near East, forced to withdraw from the Dardanelles after losses as heavy as the Turks had suffered. The English politicians were content to take the blame for not having landed troops at Alexandretta, the one really sensible place, rather than give away their French colleagues; and the rumour went round England ‘The Greeks let us down.’ Bulgaria, too, had lately joined with the Turks and Germans, so that the French insisted on the Dardanelles troops being landed not at Alexandretta, even this time, as had been intended, but at Salonica. To make matters worse, a British Army was surrounded and starving in the town of Kut, on the Mesopotamian front. Feisal’s own position grew very dangerous. He had to live at Damascus as the guest of Jemal Pasha, the Turkish general in command of the forces in Syria, and being himself an officer in the Turkish army had to swallow whatever insults the bullying Jemal threw at the Arabs in his drunken fits. Feisal had, moreover, been president of the secret freedom society in Syria before the War and was at the mercy of its members; if he was denounced by any of these—perhaps a condemned man might try to buy his life with the information—he was lost. So Feisal had to stay anxiously with Jemal at Damascus, and spent his time rubbing up his military knowledge. His elder brother Ali was now raising troops down in Arabia, giving as the excuse that he and Feisal intended to lead them in an attack against the English in Egypt. But the troops were really intended for use against the Turks as soon as Feisal gave the word. Jemal with his brutal Turkish humour would send for Feisal and take him to see the hanging of his Syrian revolutionary friends. The doomed men dared not show that they knew what Feisal’s real intentions were, for fear that he and his family would share their fate—Feisal was the one leader in whom Syria had confidence. Nor could Feisal show them what his feelings were by word or look; he was under the watchful eye of Jemal. Only once did his agony make him lose self-possession; he burst out that these executions would cost Jemal all that he was trying to avoid. Then it took the strongest efforts of his friends at Constantinople, the leading men of Turkey, to save him from paying the price of these rash words.

Feisal’s correspondence with his father in Mecca was an extremely dangerous one: old family retainers were used to take messages up and down the pilgrims’ railway, messages hidden in sword hilts, in cakes, sewn between the soles of sandals, or written in invisible ink on the wrappers of harmless packages. In all his letters Feisal begged his father to wait, to delay the revolt until a wiser time. But Hussein trusted in God rather than in military common sense and decided that the soldiers of his province were able to beat the Turks in fair fight. He sent a message to Feisal with the news that all was now ready. Ali had raised the troops and they were waiting for Feisal’s inspection before starting for the front.

Feisal told Jemal of his father’s message (without, of course, explaining its hostile significance) and asked permission to go down to Medina. To his dismay Jemal replied that Enver Pasha, the Turkish Commander-in-Chief, was now on his way to the province and that Enver, Feisal and himself would attend the inspection together. Feisal had planned to raise his father’s crimson banner of revolt as soon as he arrived in Medina and so take the Turks unawares: but now he was saddled with two uninvited guests, the two chief generals of his enemy, to whom, by the Arab laws of hospitality, he could do no harm. They would probably delay his action so long that the secret of the revolt would be given away.

In the end, however, everything passed off well, though the irony of the review was almost unbearable. Enver, Jemal and Feisal watched the troops manœuvring in the dusty plain outside the city gate, rushing up and down in sham camel-fights or playing the ancient Arab game of javelin-throwing on horseback. At last Enver turned to Feisal and asked, ‘Are these all volunteers for the Holy War?’ ‘Yes,’ said Feisal, with another Holy War in mind. ‘Willing to fight to the death against the enemies of the faithful?’ ‘Yes,’ said Feisal again, and then the Arab chiefs came up to be presented, and one of the prophet’s family drew Feisal aside privately, whispering, ‘My lord, shall we kill them now?’ Feisal answered, ‘No, they are our guests.’

The chiefs protested that it must be done, for so the war could be ended in two blows. They tried to force Feisal’s hand, and he had actually to go among them, just out of hearing of Enver and Jemal, to plead for the lives of these two uninvited guests of his, monsters who had murdered his best friends. In the end he had to make excuses and take the party quickly back into the town under his personal protection and from there escort them all the way to Damascus with a guard of his own slaves to save them from death on the way. He explained this action as being merely great courtesy shown to distinguished guests. But Enver and Jemal were most suspicious of what they had seen and at once sent large Turkish forces by the railway to garrison the holy cities. They wanted to keep Feisal captive at Damascus; but telegrams came from the Turks at Medina asking for him to return at once to prevent disorder, and Jemal reluctantly let him go. Feisal was forced, however, to leave his suite behind as hostages.

Feisal found Medina full of Turks, an entire Army Corps of them, and his hope of a surprise rush, winning success with hardly a shot fired, had become impossible. His chivalry had ruined him. However, he had been prudent too long now. On the same day that Feisal’s suite escaped from Damascus, riding out into the desert to take refuge with a desert chief, Feisal showed his hand: he raised the banner of revolt outside Medina.

His first rush on Medina was a desperate business. The Arabs were badly armed and short of ammunition, the Turks were in great force. In the middle of the battle one of the principal Arab tribes broke and ran, and the whole force was driven outside the walls into the open plain. The Turks then opened fire on them with artillery and machine guns. The Arabs, who only used muzzle-loading guns in their tribal battles, were terrified: and thought that the noise of the bursting shells was equalled by their killing powers. Feisal as a trained soldier knew better, and with his kinsman, young Ali ibn el Hussein, rode about on his mare among the shell-bursts to show that the danger was not so great as the tribesmen feared. But not even Feisal could draw the Arabs to the charge. Part of the tribe that had first broken approached the Turkish commander and offered to surrender if its villages were spared. There was a lull in the fighting and the Turkish general invited the chiefs to talk over the matter; secretly at the same time he sent troops to surround one of the suburbs of the city which he singled out for his object lesson in Turkish terror. While the conference was in progress these Turks were ordered to carry the suburb by assault and massacre every living creature in it. It was done, horribly. Those who were not butchered were burned alive—men, women and children together. The Turkish general and these troops had served together in Armenia and such methods were not new to them.

The massacre sent a shock of incredulous horror across Arabia. The first rule of Arab war was that women and children too young to fight must be spared and that property which could not be carried off in fair raiding should be left undamaged. Feisal’s men realized what Feisal knew already, that the Turks would stick at nothing, and they fell back to consider what must now be done. They were in honour bound, because of the massacre, to fight to the last man; and yet their arms were plainly worth nothing against modern Turkish (and German) rifles and machine-guns and artillery. The Turks in Medina realizing that they were henceforward in a state of real or threatened siege, made their situation better by driving out into the desert many hundreds of the poorer Arab townsmen whom they would otherwise have had to feed.

Feisal’s attack on Medina had been timed to the day of his father’s attempt on the Turks at Mecca. Hussein was more successful; he succeeded in capturing the city itself at the first rush, but it was some days before he could silence the Turkish forts that commanded the city from the hills outside. The Turks were foolish enough to shell the holy Mosque which was the goal of the yearly pilgrimage. It contained the Kaaba, a cubical shrine into whose walls was built the sacred black stone worshipped there as a rain-bringing charm long before Mohammed’s time and the one exception that Mohammed was forced to make in his orders against the worshipping of idols. The black stone was said to have fallen from Heaven and what is more, probably had; it is apparently a meteorite. In the bombardment a Turkish shell killed several worshippers praying before the Kaaba itself and a second shudder of horror ran through the Mohammedan world. Jiddah, the port of Mecca, was also captured with the assistance of the British Navy; and the whole province with the exception of Medina, was after a time cleared of Turks.

From their camp to the west of Medina, Feisal and Ali sent messenger after messenger to the Red Sea port, Rabegh, which was on the roundabout road between Medina and Mecca. They knew that the British, at their father’s request, were landing military stores there. Yet they got nothing from Rabegh but a little food and a consignment of Japanese rifles, rusty relics of the fighting at Port Arthur ten years before, which burst as soon as fired. Their father remained in Mecca.

Ali went at last to see what was happening: he found that the local chief at Rabegh had decided that the Turks were bound to win and so had decided to join them. Ali made a demonstration and got help from another brother, Zeid, and the chief fled as an outlaw to the hills. Ali and Zeid took possession of his villages and found in them great stores of arms and food landed from the British ships. The temptation to settle down for a spell of ease and comfort was too much for them. They stopped where they were.

Feisal was left to carry on the war alone a hundred and fifty miles away inland. In August 1915 he visited another port on the Red Sea farther north than Rabegh, called Yenbo, where the British Navy had landed a force of marines and captured the Turkish garrison. Here he met a British colonel who was acting under orders of the High Commissioner in Egypt, and asked him for military help. After some time he was sent a battery of mountain guns and some maxims which were to be handled by Egyptian Army gunners. The Arabs with Feisal rejoiced when the Egyptians arrived outside Medina, and thought that they were now the equal of the Turks. They went forward in a mob and drove in first the Turkish outposts and then the supports, so that the commander in the city was alarmed. He reinforced the threatened flank, bringing up heavy guns which opened long-range fire on the Arabs. One shell burst close to Feisal’s tent where he was sitting with his Staff. The Egyptian gunners were asked to return the fire and knock out the Turkish guns: but they had to admit that they were helpless. The Turkish guns were nine thousand yards away and their own—twenty-year-old Krupp guns—only had a range of three thousand. The Arabs laughed scornfully and retreated again to their defiles in the hills.

Feisal was greatly discouraged. His men were tired; he had had heavy losses. Money was running short and his army was gradually melting away. He did not like having to carry on entirely by himself while his brother Abdulla remained in Mecca and Ali and Zeid at Rabegh. He fell back with his main body to a position nearer the coast, leaving local tribes to carry on his policy of sudden raids on Turkish supply columns and night attacks on the outposts. It was at this point in the history of the Revolt that Lawrence appeared and turned the tide.

V

At the outbreak of the War Lawrence had of course to give up the idea of continuing at Carchemish, which was in Turkish territory. He was, at the time, in Oxford—it was the off-season for digging—and he much resented this interruption of what had been to him a nearly perfect life. He tried to join an Officers’ Training Corps at Oxford, but without success. He tried again in London; but it was no good. It has been incorrectly said that he was marked as ‘physically below fighting standard’: this would, however, be quite believable. Perhaps the only other man in England who was Lawrence’s equal in physical strength and endurance was Jimmy Wilde, the fly-weight boxer, a World’s champion who not only beat every other man of his own weight but for years was unbeaten by boxers weighing a whole stone heavier than himself. Wilde was rejected as being of ‘emaciated physique’ and not fit for active service. But in Lawrence’s case it was only a temporary glut of recruits that was responsible for his being turned away. Dr. Hogarth heard that Lawrence was at a loose end and got him given a week’s trial, as a favour, by Colonel Hedley, the head of the Geographic Section of the General Staff at Whitehall. Three weeks later Hogarth met Hedley and asked him, ‘Did you find young Lawrence any use?’ ‘He’s running my entire department for me now,’ said Hedley shortly. Lawrence’s task here was making maps of Sinai, Belgium and France.

Four months later, on Turkey’s entering the War, Lord Kitchener ordered all members of the Sinai Survey expedition of 1913—14 to be sent immediately to Egypt, where their knowledge would be useful in view of a possible Turkish invasion of Egypt. General Maxwell wired that they were not wanted. Kitchener wired back that they were already on their way. In Cairo Lawrence naturally went to the Military Map Department of the Intelligence Service, where again he made his presence felt. About certain parts of Syria and Mesopotamia he knew even more than the Turks themselves. At the same time he was engaged in general intelligence as staff-captain at General Headquarters, Egypt. He was charged with making out a periodic report to the General Staff as to the position of the various divisions and smaller units of the Turkish Army: this information came from spies or from prisoners captured on the various fronts. Although a most valuable officer he was not popular with the senior military officers about him, particularly with those fresh from England who did not believe that a civilian like Lawrence was competent to talk about military subjects. There was annoyance, for instance, when he interrupted two generals discussing a reported movement of Turkish troops from So-and-So to Such-and-Such by saying: ‘Nonsense; they can’t make the distance in twice the time you give them. The roads are bad and there’s no local transport. Besides, their commanding officer is a very lazy fellow.’ Also he was looked on with disfavour for going about without a military belt, in patent-leather shoes, and not wearing the right-coloured socks or tie. His reports, too, were not written in the style favoured. The War Office handbook of information about the Turkish Army, of which he was joint editor for fourteen editions, contained such comments as ‘General Abd el Mahmoud commanding the —th Division is half-Albanian by birth and a consumptive; an able officer and a gunnery expert; but a vicious scoundrel, and will accept bribes.’ These personal comments were thought unnecessary: the theory held by the British was that their officer opponents were gallant fellows entitled to every courtesy. An objection was also raised to such scholarly footnotes as a comparison between the new Boy Scout movement in Turkey and the Corps of Pages kept in Egypt in the time of the Janissaries. The General Staff disliked history and suspected a joke. Among Lawrence’s other tasks was questioning suspected persons; he had the gift of being able to tell at once from small points in a man’s dress and from the dialect he spoke more or less what he was and where he came from. Two recorded examples will serve. An ugly-looking ruffian was caught on the Suez Canal, suspected of being a spy. He said he was a Syrian. Lawrence, overcoming his usual aversion to looking a man in the face, said ‘He’s lying; look at his little pig eyes! The man’s an Egyptian of the pedlar class.’ He spoke sharply in the pedlar’s dialect, and the man admitted who he was. On another occasion, but later in the War, when Lawrence had greatly improved his accuracy, a fine-looking Arab came in with information. Lawrence’s colleague said: ‘Here’s one of the real Bedouin come to see you.’ Lawrence said, ‘No! He’s not got the Bedouin walk or style. He’s a Syrian Arab farmer living under the protection of the Beni Sakhr tribe,’ and so it proved.

In 1915 Cairo got so full of generals and colonels with nothing to do but send unnecessary messages about and get in the way of the few people who were doing any work, that it was mere comic opera. No less than three General Staffs fully officered were collected in Egypt, and it was impossible for any one of them to define exactly where its duties began and ended. There was current a wicked parody of an old Egyptian-Christian creed, in which occurred the phrase, ‘And yet there are not three Incompetents but one Incompetent.’ One of the most intimate glimpses we get of Lawrence in 1915 is of a small grinning second-lieutenant, with hair of unmilitary length and no belt, hiding behind a screen in the Savoy Hotel with another equally unmilitary colleague, softly counting ‘One, two, three, four!’ ... through a hole in the screen. They were counting generals. An important conference was going on in the room, for generals only. His colleague swears to me that Lawrence counted up to sixty-five. He himself only made it sixty-four, but one of the Brigadier-Generals may have moved.

Lawrence went on several journeys to the Suez Canal, where a weak Turkish attack had been made and a strong one was always expected, and one to the Senussi Desert in the West of Egypt (I believe to discover the whereabouts of British prisoners captured by the hostile Arabs there). He was also sent to Athens to get contact with the Levant group of the British Secret Service, whose agent in Egypt he was for a time until the work grew too important for an officer of his low rank to perform. He also was engaged in getting information about the anti-British revolutionary societies in Egypt and, because the Egyptians are not as loyal in their secret societies as the Syrians and Mesopotamians, was always having visitors; one party after another came offering to betray the names of its fellow-members until he had seen nearly the whole society. Lawrence’s chief difficulty was to prevent the various parties meeting each other on the office-stairs. Social life in Egypt bored him. ‘It’s a bad life this,’ he wrote at the end of March 1915, ‘living at close quarters with a khaki crowd very intent on “Banker” and parades and lunch. I am a total abstainer from all of these and so a snob.’ In April 1916 he was sent to Mesopotamia. He had an official task in which he was not much interested and a private intention known only to a few colleagues whom he could trust.

In Mesopotamia an army composed of mixed Indian and British troops had been marching up the Tigris from the Persian Gulf and had at first met with success, but sickness, transport difficulties, bad strategy and strong Turkish forces had held up the advance, which became a retreat: and soon General Townshend with a large force was cut off and besieged in the town of Kut. Provisions were failing and the fall was believed to be a certainty because reinforcements could not arrive from India in time. Lawrence’s official task given him direct from the War Office at London was to go as member of a secret mission to the Turkish commander who was besieging Kut: to persuade him not to press the siege. It was thought possible that a large bribe might work because it was known that the Turks were themselves in difficulties. They had few troops—the Arabic-speaking regiments were openly mutinous—and a Russian army to the North had just captured the town of Erzeroum, the capital of Kurdistan, in the famous snow battle. The Russians were pressing on towards Anatolia, the Turks’ home province; so that at any moment the siege might collapse. As a matter of fact the capture of Erzeroum had been ‘arranged’—Colonel Buchan’s novel Greenmantle has more than a flavour of truth—and the War Office hoped that the same success could be repeated at Kut. Nevertheless bribes would be useless, Lawrence had told those who sent him, and would only encourage the Turks. The Turkish commander, being a nephew of Enver, the chief Young Turk, never needed to worry about money.

The British Generals in Mesopotamia were not pleased with the idea of this conference. Two of them told Lawrence that his intentions (which they did not know) were dishonourable, and unworthy of a soldier (which he never acknowledged himself to be). Now, this Mesopotamian Army was under the orders of the Government of India and though Lord Kitchener, who was in general command of the Imperial British Forces, had early in the War approached two leaders of the secret freedom society of Mesopotamia to offer to help in a mutiny which might have cleared Mesopotamia of the Turks at a single blow, his hand had been held. The Indian Government was afraid that if the Arabs mutinied it would be not able to grant Mesopotamia those benefits of British protection which had been granted to Burma some years before; the Arabs would want to remain free. So the help that Kitchener would have given was withheld and the mutiny did not come about. Instead, an army was sent from India to act without the Arabs: with disastrous results. The British and Indians were looked upon as invaders as unwelcome as the Turks and were not only given no help but were constantly being raided and robbed by the local Arab tribes.

Lawrence’s private intention, which was the real reason of his coming, had been to see whether the situation in Mesopotamia would allow of local co-operation on Nationalist lines between the British and the Euphrates tribes, whom he knew well from his Carchemish days. Some of these were already in revolt—he hoped further to get in touch with the great Ruwalla tribe of the Northern Syrian desert—and with his assistance might soon have cut all Turkish communications by holding up river traffic and raiding supply columns until the army before Kut would be in a state of siege itself. Kut could hold out until he had made his preparations; if only eight more aeroplanes could be found for dropping provisions into the town. But he found that it was hopeless. The policy of wresting Mesopotamia without Arab help and making it part of the Empire was to be stubbornly maintained; sooner, almost, than recognize the Arabs as a political force the English would leave the country to the Turks. The result was that Lawrence did not do what he intended.

The conference with the Turkish General to which he and two others went across the Turkish lines with a white flag and with handkerchiefs bound over their eyes, was merely an attempt to ransom, on grounds of humanity or interest, those of the garrison of Kut whose health had suffered by the siege and whom captivity would kill, and to persuade the general not to punish the Arab civilians in Kut who had helped the British. After these things had been not very satisfactorily settled—they got nearly a thousand of the sick exchanged against healthy Turks; they should have got three thousand—the conference developed into a mere exchange of courtesies. In these, however, Lawrence and Colonel Aubrey Herbert, who was with him, would not join. When the Turk said, ‘After all, gentlemen, our interests as Empire builders are much the same as yours. There is nothing that need stand between us,’ Herbert replied shortly: ‘Only a million dead Armenians,’ and that ended the conference.

Lawrence had one more task; to explain to the British Staff in Mesopotamia, on behalf of the High Commissioner of Egypt, that the help promised to Sherif Hussein did not include a support of his claim to the Caliphate, the spiritual headship of the Mohammedan world, as was believed in India, with alarm. The official Caliph was still the ex-sultan Abdul Hamid. Having done this, he came away. Kut surrendered (half its garrison died in captivity and the Turks hanged a number of the Arab civilians) and the remainder of the British Army, whose advance the local Arabs continued to resent, lost enormous numbers of men and spent another two years in reaching Bagdad.

Things were going from bad to worse. The British High Commissioner, who had made the promises to Sherif Hussein on behalf of the British Foreign Office, found himself in difficulties. The general commanding the British forces in Egypt, who took his orders only from the War Office, did not believe in the Revolt and was not going to waste men, arms or money over it. His rule was ‘No side shows.’ It is possible also that he did not like the High Commissioner, a civilian, to be interfering in military matters. So, outside Medina, Feisal, waiting every day anxiously for the artillery and other stores which had been promised him, and with his own private treasure nearly spent in paying his armies, was left in disappointment and inaction. After the landing of a few native Egyptian troops and stores at Rabegh nothing much more was done; and it seemed that the Revolt was already over. Many of the staff officers at Cairo looked on all this as a great joke at the expense of the High Commissioner. They laughed that Hussein would soon find himself on a Turkish scaffold. As plain soldiers they had a fellow-feeling for the Turk, and could not see the tragedy and dishonour that they were intending. To make matters worse a French military mission was arranging an intrigue against Hussein in his towns of Jiddah and Mecca, and was also proposing to the harassed old man military schemes that would have ruined his cause in the eyes of all Mohammedans.

In Cairo Lawrence had come to be more plagued than ever by generals and colonels, and he discovered that since his great interest in the Arab Revolt was known he was about to be put in a position where he could not do much more to help it. He decided to get away in time. He asked for permission to go, but it was not given, so he began making himself so obnoxious that the General Staff would be only too glad to be rid of him. He was already known as a conceited young puppy and began a campaign of pin-pricks, correcting the grammar of the most senior officers and commenting on their ignorance of the geography and customs of the East. The break came in this way. The chief of staff one day rang him up on the telephone. ‘Is that Captain Lawrence? Where exactly is the Turkish Forty-first Division now stationed?’ Lawrence said, ‘At So-and-So near Aleppo. The 131st, 132nd, 133rd regiments compose it. They are quartered in the villages So-and-So, So-and-So, and So-and-So.’

‘Have you those villages marked on the map?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you noted them yet on the Dislocation files?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because they are better in my head until I can check the information.’

‘Yes, but you can’t send your head along to Ismailia every time.’ (Ismailia was a long way from Cairo.)

‘I wish to goodness I could,’ said Lawrence, and rang off.

This had the desired effect; it was decided to get rid of Lawrence somehow. He took the opportunity to ask for ten days’ leave to go for a holiday on the Red Sea in company with a Foreign Office official, Storrs (afterwards the first Christian Governor of Jerusalem since the Crusades), who was visiting the Sherif on important business. He got his leave, and at the same time made arrangements to be transferred from the Military Intelligence Service to the ‘Arab Bureau,’ which was under the direct orders of the British Foreign Office. The Arab bureau was a department that had just been formed for helping the Arab Revolt and was run by a small group of men, some of them, like Lloyd and Hogarth, old friends of Lawrence’s, who really knew something about the Arabs—and about the Turks. Lawrence’s transfer was arranged directly between the War Office and the Foreign Office in London, so that gave him time. He intended to do much in his ten days’ leave.

VI

Lawrence and Storrs arrived at Jiddah, the port of Mecca on the Red Sea, in October 1916. (At this point Lawrence begins his public account of his adventures, the book Revolt in the Desert.)

The Sherif’s second son Abdulla came to meet the two Englishmen, riding on a white mare with a guard of richly armed slaves, on foot, about him. Abdulla had just come home victorious from a battle at the town of Taif, inland from Mecca, which he had won from the Turks in a sudden rush; he was in great good humour. Abdulla was reported to be the real leader of revolt, the brain behind Hussein, but Lawrence, summing him up, decided that he might be a good statesman and useful later to the Arabs if ever they succeeded in winning freedom (and his judgment of the present King of Transjordania was correct), but he did not seem somehow to be the prophet who was needed to make the revolt a success. He was too affable, too shrewd, too cheerful: prophets are men of a different stuff. Lawrence’s chief object in coming to Jiddah was to find the real prophet, if there was one, whose enthusiasm would set the desert on fire; so he decided at once to look elsewhere.

Meanwhile Abdulla talked to Lawrence about the campaign, and gave him a report to be repeated to headquarters in Egypt. He said that the English were largely responsible for the Arab lack of success. They had neglected to cut the pilgrims’ railway, and the Turks had therefore been able to collect transport and supplies to reinforce Medina. Feisal had been driven from Medina and the enemy there was now preparing a large force to advance on Rabegh, the Red Sea port. The Arabs with Feisal who were barring their road through the hills were too weak in supplies and arms to hold out long. Lawrence replied that Hussein had asked the British not to cut the railway because he would soon need it for his victorious advance into Syria, and that the dynamite which had been sent to him had been returned as too dangerous to be used by Arabs. Moreover, Feisal had not asked for more supplies or arms since the time when Egyptian gunners had been sent.

Abdulla answered that, if the Turks advanced, the Arab tribe called The Harb between them and Rabegh would join them and all would be lost. His father would then put himself at the head of his few troops and die fighting in defence of the city. At this point the telephone bell rang and the Sherif himself from Mecca spoke to Abdulla. Abdulla told him what was being said, and the Sherif answered, ‘Yes, that is so! The Turks will only enter over my dead body,’ and rang off. Abdulla smiled a little and asked whether in order to prevent such a disaster a British brigade, if possible composed of Mohammedan troops, might be sent to Suez, with ships waiting there to rush it to Rabegh as soon as the Turks began their march from Medina. To reach Mecca the Turks had to go through Rabegh because of the water supply, and if Rabegh could be held for a little while, he would himself soon lead up his victorious troops to Medina by the eastern road. When he was in position his brothers Feisal from the west and Ali from the south would close in and a grand attack would be made on Medina from three sides.

THE EMIR ABDULLA

from a drawing by ERIC KENNINGTON

Lawrence did not like the idea of sending troops to Rabegh, and replied that there were difficulties about providing shipping for a whole brigade. There were no wholly Mohammedan regiments in the British Army, and a brigade was not large enough anyhow. Ships’ guns would defend the beach, which was all that the brigade could defend, just as well as men on the shore. Moreover, if Christian troops were sent to the assistance of the Holy City against the Turks, it would cause bad feeling in India, where the action would be misunderstood; already there had been great excitement in India when a small British Fleet had bombarded the Turks at Jiddah, the port of Mecca. Still, he would do his best and tell the British in Egypt what Abdulla’s views were. Meanwhile might he go to Rabegh, see what the country was like and also talk with Feisal? He could find out from Feisal whether the hills could be held against the Turks if more help in arms and stores were sent from Egypt.

Abdulla consented but had to get permission from his father; which after some difficulty (for Hussein was very suspicious) was given. Abdulla wrote to his brother Ali telling him to mount Lawrence well and convey him safely and speedily to Feisal’s camp. This was all that Lawrence wanted. That night a sad-looking brass band, in tattered Turkish uniforms, whom Abdulla had captured at Taif played them Turkish and German tunes, and Abdulla told Lawrence of the plans he had made some time before for winning freedom from the Turks by the simple method of detaining important pilgrims to Mecca and holding them as hostages: but Feisal had disagreed. Then Abdulla asked Lawrence how many generations back King George could trace his ancestry: Lawrence replied, ‘Twenty-six generations; to Cedric the Saxon.’ (Or however many it was: I have forgotten, but of course Lawrence knew.) Abdulla proudly remarked that this was not bad, but that he could go seventeen better. Clearly Abdulla was not the prophet. Next day Lawrence took boat to Rabegh and there gave the letter to Ali.

Lawrence took a fancy to Ali, who was the eldest of the four brothers, a man of thirty-seven: he was pleasant-mannered, well read in Arabic literature, pious, conscientious; but he was a consumptive and his weakness made him nervous and moody. If Feisal was not what Lawrence hoped him to be, Ali would perhaps lead the revolt very fairly well. With Ali was another brother, Zeid, a boy of nineteen. He was calm and flippant and not zealous for the Revolt. He had been brought up in the harem and had not yet found himself as a man of action; but Lawrence liked him and he was more pleasant than Ali who did not like the idea of a Christian, even with the permission of the Sherif, travelling in the Holy Province. Ali did not allow Lawrence to start until after sunset lest any of his followers, whom he could not trust, should see him leave the camp. He kept the journey a secret even from his slaves, gave Lawrence an Arab cloak and headcloth to wrap round his uniform and told the old guide who was to go with him to keep his charge from all questioning and curiosity by the way, and to avoid all camps. The Arabs in Rabegh and the district were of the Harb tribe whose chief was pro-Turkish and had fled to the hills when Ali came to Rabegh with his army. They owed this chief obedience, and if he heard of Lawrence’s journey to Feisal, a band of them might be sent to stop him.

Lawrence could count on his guide: a guide had to answer with his life for that of his charge. Some years before a Harb tribesman had promised to take the traveller Huber to Medina by this very road (which was the pilgrims’ road between Medina and Mecca), but finding that he was a Christian had killed him. The murderer relied on public opinion to excuse him, but it went against him in spite of Huber having been a Christian. He had ever since lived alone in the hills without any friends to visit him and had been refused permission to marry any woman of the tribe. It was a warning to Lawrence’s guide and the guide’s son who went with them.

Lawrence, out of training after two years of office work in Cairo, found the journey trying, though the experience of riding a first-class camel of the sort trained in its paces for Arab princes was new and delightful. There were no good camels in Egypt, or in the Sinai desert where the animals though hardy and strong had not been properly trained. The party rode all night except for a short rest and sleep between midnight and the grey dawn. The road was at first over soft flat sand, along the coast between the beach and the hills. After some hours they struck the bed of what in the short rainy season of Arabia is a broad flood-river, but now was merely a wide field of stones, with here and there clumps of thorn bushes and scrub. Here the going was better for the camels and in the early sunlight they made a steady trot towards Masturah, where was the next watering-place out from Rabegh on the pilgrims’ road. Here the guide’s son watered the camels, climbing twenty feet down the side of the stone well and drawing up water in a goatskin, which he poured into a shallow trough. The camels drank about five gallons each, while Lawrence rested in the shade of a ruined stone wall, and the son smoked a cigarette.

Presently some Harb tribesmen came up and watered their she-camels. The guide did not speak to them, for they belonged to a clan with whom his own people, their neighbours, had until recently been at war and even now had little friendship. As Lawrence watched the watering two more Arabs arrived from the direction in which he was bound. Both were young and well mounted; but one was dressed in rich silk robes and embroidered headcloth, the other more plainly in white cotton with a red cotton head-dress, evidently his servant. They halted beside the well and the more splendid one slipped gracefully to the ground without making his camel kneel and said to his companion: ‘Water the camels while I go over there and rest.’ He strolled over to the wall where Lawrence was sitting and pretended to be at his ease, offering a cigarette just rolled and licked. ‘Your presence is from Syria?’ he asked. Lawrence politely parried the question, not wishing to reveal himself, and asked in turn: ‘Your presence is from Mecca?’ The Arab also was unwilling to reveal himself.

Then there a comedy was played which Lawrence did not understand until the guide explained it later. The servant stood holding the camels’ halters waiting for the Harb herdsmen to finish their watering. ‘What is it, Mustafa?’ said his richly-dressed master, ‘Water them at once!’ ‘They will not let me,’ said the servant dismally. The master grew furious and struck his servant about the head and shoulders with his riding stick. The servant looked hurt, astonished and angry, and was about to hit back when he thought better of it and ran to the well. The herdsmen were shocked and out of pity made way for him. As his camels drank from their trough they whispered, ‘Who is he?’ The servant answered, ‘The Sherif’s cousin, from Mecca.’ The herdsmen at once untied bundles of green leaves and buds from the thorn trees and fed the camels of this honourable visitor. He watched them contentedly and called God’s blessing on them: soon he and his servant rode away south along the road to Mecca, while Lawrence and his guides went off in the opposite direction.

The old guide began to chuckle and explain the joke. The two men were both of noble birth. The one who played the part of master was Ali ibn el Hussein, a sherif, the other was his cousin. They were nobles of the Harith tribe and blood enemies of the Harb clan to which these herdsmen belonged. Fearing that they would be delayed or driven off the water if they were recognized, they pretended to be master and servant from Mecca. Ali ibn el Hussein afterwards became Lawrence’s best friend among the Arab fighting men and at one time saved his life: he had already made a name for himself in the fighting at Medina and had been the leader of the Ateiba tribesmen in much camel-fighting with the Turks. Ali had run away from home at the age of eleven to his uncle, a famous robber chieftain, and lived by his hands for months until his father caught him. The old guide grew enthusiastic in his account of Ali, ending with the local proverb, ‘The children of Harith are children of battle.’

The day’s ride which began over shingle continued over pure white sand. The glare dazzled the eyes, so that Lawrence had to frown hard and pull his headcloth forward as a peak over his eyes and beneath them too. The heat beat up in waves from the ground. After awhile the pilgrims’ road was left and a short cut was taken inland over a gradually rising ground of rock ridges covered with drift sand. Here grew patches of hard wiry grass and shrubs, on which a few sheep and goats were pasturing. The guide then showed Lawrence a boundary stone and said with some relief that he was now at home in his own tribal ground and might come off his guard.

By sunset they reached a hamlet of twenty huts where the guide bought flour and kneaded a dough cake with water, two inches thick and eight across. He cooked it in a brush-wood fire that a woman provided for him and, shaking off the ashes, shared it with Lawrence. They had come sixty miles from Rabegh since the evening before and still had as far again to go before they reached Feisal’s camp. Lawrence was stiff and aching, his skin blistered and his eyes weary. They stopped at the hamlet for two hours and rode on in pitch darkness up valleys and down valleys. Underfoot it seemed to be sand, for there was no noise, and the only change came from the heat of the air in the hollows and the comparative coolness of the open places. Lawrence kept on falling asleep in the saddle and being woken up again suddenly and sickeningly as he made a clutch by instinct at the saddle-post to recover his balance. Long after midnight they halted, slept for three hours and went on again under a moon. The road was among trees along another water-course with sharp pointed hills on either side, black and white in the moonlight: the air was stifling. Day came as they entered a broader part of the valley with dust spinning round here and there in the dawn wind. On the right lay another hamlet of brown and white houses looking like a dolls’ village in the shadow of a huge precipice thousands of feet high.

From the houses after a while came out a talkative old man on a camel and joined the party. The guide gave him short answers and showed that he was unwelcome, and the old man to make things easier burrowed in his saddle pouch and offered the party food. It was yesterday’s dough cake moistened with liquid butter and dusted with sugar. One made pellets of it with the fingers and ate it that way. Lawrence accepted little, but the guide and his son ate greedily, so that the old man went short: and this was as it should be, for it was considered effeminate for an Arab to carry so much food on a journey of a mere hundred miles. The old man gave news of Feisal; the day before he had been repulsed in an attack and had had a few men wounded: he gave the names of the men and details of their wounds.

They were riding over a firm pebbly ground among acacia and tamarisk trees and their long morning shadows. The valley was like a park; a quarter of a mile broad. It was walled in by precipices, a thousand feet high, of brown and dark-red with pink stains, at the base were long streaks of dark green stone. After seven miles they came to a tumbledown barrier which ran across the valley and right up the hill-sides wherever the slope was not too steep to take the wall: in the middle were two walled-in enclosures. Lawrence asked the old man what the wall meant. He answered instead that he had been in Damascus, Constantinople and Cairo and had friends among the great men of Egypt, and asked whether Lawrence knew any of the English there? He was very inquisitive about Lawrence’s intentions and tried to trip him in Egyptian phrases. Lawrence answered in the Syrian dialect of Aleppo, whereupon the old man told him of prominent Syrians whom he knew. Lawrence knew them too. The man then began to talk local politics, of the Sherif and his sons, and asked Lawrence what Feisal would do next. Lawrence as usual avoided answering, and indeed he knew nothing of Feisal’s plans. The guide came to the rescue and changed the subject. Later Lawrence found that the old man was a spy in Turkish pay who used to send frequent reports to Medina of what came past his village for Feisal’s army.

After a long morning’s travel, through two more valleys and across a saddle of hills, the party found itself in a third valley, where the old spy had told them that they would soon find Feisal. In this valley they stopped at a large village where there was a strip of clear water two hundred yards long and twelve wide, bordered with grass and flowers. Here they were given bread and dates by negro slaves—the best dates Lawrence had ever tasted—at the house of a principal man. The owner was, however, away with Feisal, and his wife and children were in tents in the hills, looking after the camels. The climate was feverish in these valleys and the Arabs only spent five months in the year in their houses: in their absence the negroes did the work for them. The black men did not mind the climate and prospered with their gardening, growing melons, marrows, cucumber, grapes, tobacco, which gave them pocket-money. They married among themselves, built their own houses and were well treated by the Arabs. Indeed so many of them had been given their freedom that there were thirteen purely negro villages in this valley alone.

After their bread and dates, the party went on farther up the valley, which was about four hundred yards broad and enclosed by bare red and black rocks with sharp edges and ridges, and soon came upon parties of Feisal’s soldiers and grazing herds of camels. The guide exchanged greetings with them and hurried his pace; they pressed towards the hamlet where Feisal was encamped. Here there were about a hundred mud houses with luxurious gardens. They were all built upon mounds of earth twenty feet high, which had been carefully piled up, basket-full by basket-full, in the course of generations. These mounds became islands in the rainy season, with the flood-water rushing between them. At the village where they had just been there were scores of similar islands, but hundreds more had been washed away and their occupants drowned in a cloudburst some years before; an eight-foot wall of water had raced down the valley and carried everything before it. The guide led on to the top of one of these mounds where they made their camels kneel by the yard-gate of a long low house. A slave with a silver-hilted sword in his hand took Lawrence to an inner court. The account of Lawrence’s meeting there with Feisal can best be given in Lawrence’s own words:

‘On the farther side of the inner court, framed between the uprights of a black doorway, stood a white figure waiting tensely for me. 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. Feisal looked very tall and pillar-like, very slender, in his long white silk robes and his brown headcloth bound with a brilliant scarlet and gold cord. His eyelids were dropped; and his black beard and colourless face were like a mask against the strange still watchfulness of his body. His hands were crossed in front of him on his dagger.

‘I greeted him. He made way for me into the room and sat down on his carpet near the door. As my eyes grew accustomed to the shade, they saw that the little room held many silent figures, looking at me or at Feisal steadily. He remained staring down at his hands, which were twisting slowly about his dagger. At last he enquired softly how I had found the journey. I spoke of the heat and he asked how long from Rabegh, commenting that I had ridden fast for the season.

‘“And do you like our place here in Wadi Safra?”

‘“Well; but it is far from Damascus.”

‘The word had fallen like a sword into their midst. There was a quiver. Then everybody present stiffened where he sat, and held his breath for a silent minute. Some, perhaps, were dreaming of far-off success: others may have thought it a reflection on their late defeat. Feisal at length lifted his eyes, smiling at me, and said, “Praise be to God, there are Turks nearer us than that.” We all smiled with him, and I rose and excused myself for the moment.’

Any reader, by the way, who prefers Mr. Lowell Thomas’s version of these incidents is welcome to his choice:

‘On arrival at Jiddah, Lawrence succeeded in getting permission from Grand Shereef Hussein to make a short camel journey inland to the camp of Emir Feisal, third son of the Grand Shereef who was attempting to keep the fires of revolution alive. The Arab cause looked hopeless. There were not enough bullets left to keep the army in gazelle meat and the troops were reduced to John the Baptist’s melancholy desert fare of locusts and wild honey.

‘After exchanging the usual Oriental compliments over many sweetened cups of Arabian coffee, the first question Lawrence asked Feisal was, “When will your army reach Damascus?” The question evidently nonplussed the Emir, who gazed gloomily through the tent-flap at the bedraggled remnants of his father’s army. “In sh’ Allah,” replied Feisal, stroking his beard. “There is neither power nor might save in Allah, the high, the tremendous! May He look with favour upon our cause. But I fear the gates of Damascus are farther beyond our reach at present than the gates of Paradise. Allah willing, our next step will be an attack on the Turkish garrison at Medina where we hope to deliver the tomb of the Prophet from our enemies.”’

VII

Lawrence visited the Egyptian gunners, who seemed unhappy. Egyptians are a home-loving race and they were fighting against the Turks, for whom they had a sentimental feeling, among the Bedouins, whom they thought savages. Under British officers they had learned to be soldierly, to keep themselves smart, to pitch their tents in a regular line, to salute their officers smartly. The Arabs were always laughing at them for all this, and their feelings were hurt. Next Lawrence had a long talk with Feisal and his supporter Maulud, an Arab who had been an officer in the Turkish army and had twice been degraded for talking of Arab freedom. Maulud had been captured by the British while commanding a Turkish cavalry regiment against them in Mesopotamia. But as soon as he heard of the Sherif’s Revolt he had volunteered to fight the Turks, and many other Arab officers with him. So now he began to complain bitterly that the Arab army was being utterly neglected: the Sherif sent them thirty thousand pounds a month for expenses but not enough barley, rice, flour, ammunition or rifles, and they got no machine-guns, mountain-guns, technical help or information. Lawrence stopped Maulud and said that he came for the very purpose of hearing and reporting to the British in Egypt what was needed, but that he must first know exactly how the campaign was going. Feisal gave him the history of the Revolt from the very beginning, as it has been told in a previous chapter, and mentioned mischievously among other things that in the fighting with the Turkish outposts, which took place usually at night because the Turkish artillery was then blinded, the battle would begin with curses, insults and foul language: and this wordy warfare reached its climax when the Turks in a frenzy called the Arabs ‘English!’ and the Arabs screamed back ‘Germans!’ There were no Germans in the Holy Province and Lawrence was the first Englishman: but this final foul insult was always the signal for hand-to-hand fighting. Lawrence asked Feisal his plans and Feisal said that until Medina fell they had to remain on guard, for the Turks were certainly intending to recapture Mecca. He did not think that the Arabs would want to defend the hill-country between Medina and Rabegh merely by sitting still and sniping from the hills. If the Turks moved, he proposed to move too. He favoured an attack on Medina from four sides at once with four armies of tribesmen, with himself and his three brothers each at the head of an army. Whatever the success of the attack, it would check the advance on Mecca and give his father time to arm and train regular troops.

For without regular troops a steady war against the Turks was impossible; the tribesmen could not be persuaded to stay away from their families more than a month or two at a time, and soon got bored with the war it there was no chance of exciting camel-charges and loot. Feisal talked at some length and Maulud, who had sat fidgeting, cried out, ‘Don’t write a history of us. The only thing to be done is to fight and fight and kill them. Give me a battery of mountain-guns and machine-guns and I will finish this war off for you. We talk and talk and do nothing.’

Feisal was dead tired: his eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks hollow. He looked years older than thirty-one. For the rest, he was tall, graceful, vigorous, with a royal dignity of head and shoulders, and beautiful movements. He knew of these gifts and therefore much of his public speech was by sign and gesture. His men loved him, and he lived for nothing but his work. He always overtaxed his strength and Lawrence was told how once after a long spell of fighting in which he had to guard himself, lead the charges, control and encourage his men, he had collapsed in a fit and been carried away from the victory unconscious with foam on his lips.

At supper that night there was a mixed company of sheikhs of many desert tribes, Arabs from Mesopotamia, men of the Prophet’s family from Mecca. Lawrence, who had not revealed himself except to Feisal and Maulud, spoke as a Syrian Arab and introduced subjects for argument which would excite the company to speak their minds. He wished to sound their courage at once. Feisal, smoking continual cigarettes, kept control of the conversation even at its hottest, and without seeming to do so stamped his mind on the speakers. Lawrence spoke with sorrow of the Syrian Arabs whom the Turks had executed for preaching freedom. The sheikhs took him up sharply. The men, they said, had got what they deserved for intriguing with the French and English: they had been prepared, if the Turks were beaten, to accept the English or French in their place. Feisal smiled, almost winked at Lawrence, and said that though proud to be allies of the English, the Arabs were rather afraid of a friendship so powerful that it might smother them with over-attention. So Lawrence told a story of how the guide’s son on the ride from Rabegh had complained of the British sailors there. They came ashore every day. Soon, the guide’s son had said, they would stay overnight and settle down and finally take the country. Lawrence then had spoken of the millions of Englishmen fighting in France and had said that the French were not afraid that they would stop for ever. (As a matter of fact this was not quite true: the French peasants did have the same fear, but Lawrence had not been in France.) The guide’s son had scornfully asked whether Lawrence meant to compare France with the Holy Province.

Feisal pondered over the story and said that, after all, the British had occupied the Sudan, though as they said, not wanting it; perhaps they might also take Arabia, not wanting it. They hungered for desolate lands, to build them up and make them good: one day Arabia might tempt them. But the English idea of good and the Arab idea of good might be different, and forced good would make the people cry out in pain as much as forced evil. Feisal was a man of education, but Lawrence was surprised at the grasp that these tribesmen, the ragged and lousy ones even, had of the idea of Arab national freedom. Freedom was an entirely new idea to the country, and one that they could hardly have been taught by the educated townsmen of Mecca and Medina. But it appeared that the Sherif had wisely made his priestly family into missionaries of this idea; their words carried much weight.

The Sherif had had the sense too, in spite of his great piety as a Mohammedan, to keep religion out of the war. Though one of his chief personal reasons for declaring war was that the young Turks were irreligious, he realized that this would be an insufficient reason for the tribes. They knew that their own allies the British were Christians. ‘Christian fights Christian, why not Mohammedan Mohammedan? We want a Government which speaks our own language and will let us live in peace. And we hate the Turks.’ They were not troubled by questions of how the Arab Empire was to be ruled when the Turkish Empire was ended. They could only think of the Arab world as a confederation of independent tribes, and if they helped to free Bagdad and Damascus it would be only to give these cities the gift of independence as new members of the Arab family. If the Sherif liked to call himself Emperor of the Arabs, he might do so, but it was only a title to impress the outer world. Except for the departure of the Turks everything would go on much as before in the land.

The next morning Lawrence was up early and walking by himself among Feisal’s troops. He was anxious to find out what they were worth as fighters by the same means that he had used the night before with their chiefs. There was not much time to spare for getting the information he wanted and he had to be very observant. The smallest signs might be of use for the report which he was to make to Egypt, one which perhaps might rouse the same confidence in the Revolt that he had always had. The men received him cheerfully, lolling in the shade of bush or rock. They chaffed him for his khaki uniform, taking him for a Turkish deserter. They were a tough crowd of all ages from twelve to sixty, with dark faces: some looked half negro. They were thin, but strong and active. They would ride immense distances, day after day, run barefoot in the heat through sand and over rocks without pain, and climb the jagged hills. Their clothing was for the most part a loose shirt with sometimes short cotton drawers and a head shawl usually of red cloth, which acted in turn as towel, handkerchief or sack. They were hung with cartridge-bandoliers, several apiece, and fired off their rifles for fun at every excuse. They were in great spirits and would have liked the war to last another ten years. The Sherif was feeding them and their families and paying two pounds a month for every man and four pounds extra for the use of his camel.

There were eight thousand men with Feisal, of whom eight hundred were camel-fighters: the rest were hill men. They served only under their own tribal sheikhs and only near their own territory, arranging for their own food and transport. Each sheikh had a company of about a hundred men. When larger forces were used they were commanded by a Sherif, that is, a member of the Prophet’s family, whose dignity raised him above tribal jealousies. Blood feuds between clans were supposed to be healed by the fact of the national war and were at least suspended. The Billi, Juheina, Ateiba and other tribes were serving together in friendship for the first time in the history of Arabia. Nevertheless, members of one tribe were shy of those of another and even within a tribe no man quite trusted his neighbour; for there were also blood-feuds between clan and clan, family and family; and though all hated the Turk, family grudges might still be paid off in a big attack where it was impossible to keep track of every bullet fired.

Lawrence decided that in spite of what Feisal had said the tribesmen were good for irregular fighting and defence only. They loved loot and would tear up railways, plunder caravans and capture camels, but they were too independent to fight a pitched battle under a single command. A man who can fight well by himself is usually a ‘bad soldier’ in the army sense and it seemed absurd to try to drill these wild heroes. But if they were given Lewis guns (light machine-guns looking like overgrown rifles) to handle themselves, they might be able to hold the hills while a regular army was built up at Rabegh. This regular army was already being formed under command of another Arab deserter from the Turkish army, somewhat of a martinet, called Aziz el Masri. In the British prisoners-of-war camps in Egypt and Mesopotamia were hundreds of Syrians and Mesopotamians who would volunteer against the Turks if called upon. Being mostly townsmen and therefore not so independent, they were the right material for Aziz to train. While the desert fighters harassed the Turks by raids and sudden alarms, this regular force could be used to do the regular fighting. As for the immediate danger, the advance through the hills—Lawrence had seen what the hills were like. The only passes were valleys full of twists and turns, sometimes four hundred, sometimes only twenty yards across, between precipices; and the Arabs were fine snipers. Two hundred good men could hold up an army. Without Arab treachery the Turks could not break through; and even with treachery it would be dangerous. They could never be sure that the Arabs might not rise behind them, and if they had to guard all the passes behind them they would have few men left when they reached the coast.

The only trouble was that the Arabs were still terrified of artillery. The fear might pass in time, but at present the sound of a shell exploding sent the Arabs for miles round scuttling to shelter. They were not afraid of bullets or, indeed, of death, but the manner of death by shell-fire was too much for their imagination. It was necessary then to get guns, useful or useless, but noisy, on the Arab side. From Feisal down to the youngest boy in the army the talk was all of artillery, artillery, artillery. When Lawrence told Feisal’s men that howitzers were being landed at Rabegh that could fire a shell as thick as a man’s thigh, there was great rejoicing. The guns, of course, would be no military use; on the contrary. As fighters the Arabs were most useful in scattered irregular warfare. If they were sent guns they would crowd together for protection, and as a mob they could always be beaten by even a small force of Turks. Only, if they were given no guns, it was clear that they would go home, and this would end the Revolt. Artillery, then, was the only problem; the Revolt itself was a real thing, the deep enthusiasm of a whole province.

VIII

Later Lawrence saw Feisal again and promised to do what he could. Stores and supplies for his exclusive use would be landed at Yenbo, a hundred and twenty miles north of Rabegh, and about seventy miles from where he now was at Hamra. He would arrange, if he could, for more volunteers from the prisoners’ camps. Gun-crews and machine-gun crews would be formed from such volunteers, and they would be given whatever mountain-guns or light machine-guns could be spared in Egypt. Lastly, he would ask for British Army officers, a few good men with technical knowledge, to be sent to him as advisers and to keep touch for him with Egypt. Feisal thanked Lawrence warmly and asked him to return soon. Lawrence replied that his duties in Cairo prevented him from actual fighting, but perhaps his chiefs would let him pay a visit later when Feisal’s present needs were satisfied and things were going better. Meanwhile he wished to go to Yenbo and so on to Egypt as quickly as possible.

Feisal gave him an escort of fourteen noblemen of the Juheina tribe and in the evening he rode off. The same desolate country as before, but more broken, with shallow valleys and lava hills and finally a great stretch of sand-dunes to the distant sea. To the right, twenty miles away, was the great mountain Jebel Rudhwa, one of the grandest in the country, rising sheer from the plain; Lawrence had seen it from a hundred miles away from the well where Ali ibn el Hussein and his cousin had watered. At Yenbo Lawrence stayed at the house of Feisal’s agent, and while waiting for the ship which was to take him off, wrote out his report. After four days the ship appeared; the commander was Captain Boyle, who had helped in the taking of Jiddah. Captain Boyle did not like Lawrence at first sight, because he was wearing a native headcloth which he thought unsoldierlike. However, he took him to Jiddah, where he met Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, the British Admiral in command of the Red Sea Fleet, who was just about to cross over to the Sudan.

The Navy under Sir Rosslyn had been of the greatest assistance to the Sherif, giving him guns, machine-guns, landing parties and every other sort of help; whereas the British Army in Egypt was doing nothing for the Revolt. Practically no military help came except from the native Egyptian Army, the only troops at the disposal of the British High Commissioner. Lawrence crossed over with the Admiral and at Port Sudan met two English officers of the Egyptian army on their way to command the Egyptian troops which were with the Sherif, and to help train the regular forces now being formed at Rabegh. Of one of these, Joyce, we shall hear again: the other, Davenport, also did much for the Arab army but, working in the southern theatre of Revolt, was not with Lawrence in his northern campaign. In the Sudan, at Khartoum, Lawrence met the commander-in-chief of the Egyptian army who a few days later was made the new High Commissioner in Egypt. He was an old believer in the Revolt and glad to hear the hopeful news Lawrence brought: with his good wishes Lawrence returned to Cairo.

In Cairo there was great argument about the threatened Turkish advance on Mecca: the question was whether a brigade of Allied troops should be sent there: aeroplanes had already gone. The French were very anxious that this step should be taken, and their representative at Jiddah, a Colonel, had recently brought to Suez, to tempt the British, some artillery, machine-guns, and cavalry and infantry, all Mohammedan soldiers from the French colony of Algeria, with French officers. It was nearly decided to send British troops with these to Rabegh, under the French colonel’s command. Lawrence decided to stop this. He wrote a strong report to Headquarters saying that the Arab tribes could defend the hills between Medina and Rabegh quite well by themselves if given guns and advice, but they would certainly scatter to their tents if they heard of a landing of foreigners. Moreover, on his way up from Rabegh he had learned that the road through Rabegh, though the most used, was not the only approach to Mecca. The Turks could take a short cut by using wells of which no mention had been made in any report, and avoid Rabegh altogether; so a brigade landed there would be useless anyhow. Lawrence accused the French colonel of having motives of his own (not military ones) for wishing to land troops, and of intriguing against the Sherif and against the English: he gave evidence in support of these charges.

The Commander-in-Chief of the British Army was only too glad of Lawrence’s report as he still had no wish to help the ‘side-show.’ He sent for Lawrence. But first the Chief of Staff took Lawrence aside, talked amicably and patronizingly to him about general subjects and how jolly it was to have been at Oxford as an undergrad—he apparently thought that Lawrence was a youngster who had left for the War in his first year at college—and begged him not to frighten or encourage the Commander-in-Chief into sending troops to Rabegh, because there were no men to spare on side-shows. Lawrence agreed on condition that the Chief of Staff would see that at least extra stores and arms and a few capable officers were sent. The bargain was struck and kept. The brigade was never sent. Lawrence was much amused at the change in the attitude of the staff towards him. He was no longer a conceited young puppy, but a very valuable officer, of great intelligence, with a pungent style of writing. All because, for a wonder, his view of the Revolt was agreeable to them. It is recorded that the Commander-in-Chief was asked, after Lawrence’s interview with him, what he thought of Lawrence. He merely replied: ‘I was disappointed: he did not come in dancing-pumps.’

The friendly Head of the Arab Bureau, to which Lawrence was now transferred, told him that his place was with Feisal as his military adviser. Lawrence protested that he was not a real soldier, that he hated responsibility, and that regular officers were shortly being sent from London to direct the war properly. But his protest was overruled. The regular officers might not arrive for months, and meanwhile some responsible Englishman had to be with Feisal. So he went and left his map-making, his Arab Bulletin (a secret record of the progress of the revolutionary movements) and his reports about the whereabouts of the different Turkish divisions, to other hands, to play a part for which he felt no inclination.

IX

In December he went by ship to Yenbo, which on his advice had been made the special base for landing supplies for Feisal’s army. Here he found a British officer, Captain Garland of the Royal Engineers, teaching the Arabs the proper use of dynamite for destroying railways. Garland spoke Arabic well and knew the quick ways both of destruction and of instruction. From him Lawrence, too, learned not to be afraid of high explosive: Garland would shovel detonators, fuse and the whole bag of tricks into his pocket and jump on his camel for a week’s ride to the pilgrims’ railway. He had a weak heart and was constantly ill, but he was as careless of his health as of his detonators and kept on until he had derailed the first Turkish train and broken the first bridge. Shortly after this he died.

The general position was now this: The advanced tribes this side of Medina were keeping up the pressure on the Turks and every day sent in to Feisal captured camels or Turkish rifles or prisoners or deserters, for which he paid at a fixed rate. His brother Zeid was taking his place in Harb territory while he made sure of the tribes who were covering Yenbo. His other brother Abdulla had moved up from Mecca to the east of Medina, and by the end of November 1916 was cutting off the city’s supplies from the central oases. But he could only blockade Medina, he could not make the joint attack with Feisal and Ali and Zeid because he had with him only three machine-guns and ten almost useless mountain-guns captured from the Turks at Taif and Mecca. At Rabegh four British aeroplanes had arrived and twenty-three guns, mostly obsolete and of fourteen different patterns, but still, guns. There were now three thousand Arab infantry with Ali, of whom two thousand belonged to the new regular army which Aziz was training: also nine hundred camel corps and three hundred troops from the Egyptian army. French gunners were promised. At Yenbo, Feisal was also having his peasants, slaves and paupers organized into regular battalions in imitation of Aziz’s model. Garland held bombing classes there, fired guns, repaired machine-guns, wheels and harness, and the rifles of the whole army.

Lawrence had decided that the next thing to be done was to attack Wejh, a big port two hundred miles away from Yenbo up the Red Sea. The chief Arab tribe in those parts was the Billi; Feisal was in touch with these, and had thoughts of asking the Juheina tribe, whose territory was between Yenbo and Wejh, to make an expedition against the place. Lawrence said he would go to help raise the tribe and would give military advice. So he rode inland in company with Sherif Abd el Kerim, a half brother of the Emir of the Juheina. Lawrence was surprised at the sherif’s colour; Abd el Kerim was a coal-black Abyssinian, son of a slave girl whom the old Emir had married late in life. He was twenty-six years old, restless and active, and was very merry and intimate with, every one. He hated the Turks, who despised him for his colour (the Arabs had little colour-feeling against Africans: much more against the Indians). He was also a famous rider and made a point of taking his journeys at three times the usual speed. On this occasion Lawrence, since the camel he was riding was not his own and the day was cool, did not object.

They started in the early afternoon from Yenbo at a canter which they kept up for three hours without a pause. Then they stopped and ate bread and drank coffee while Abd el Kerim, who made no pretence at dignity, rolled about on his carpet in a dog-fight with one of his men: after this he sat up exhausted, and they exchanged comic stories until they were rested enough to get up and dance. At sunset they remounted and an hour’s mad race in the dusk brought them to the end of the flat country and a low range of hills. Here the panting camels had to walk up a narrow winding valley, which so annoyed Abd el Kerim that when he reached the top he galloped the party downhill in the dark at break-neck speed; in half an hour they reached the plain on the other side, where were the chief date gardens of the Southern Juheina. At Yenbo it had been said that these gardens and Nakhl Mubarak, the village beside them, were deserted, but as they came up they saw the flame-lit smoke of camp-fires and heard the roaring of thousands of excited camels, the shouting of lost men, volleys of signal shots, squealing of mules. Abd el Kerim was alarmed. They quietly rode into the village and, finding a deserted courtyard, hobbled the camels inside out of view. Then Abd el Kerim loaded his rifle and went on tiptoe down the street to find out what was happening; the others waited anxiously. Soon he returned to say that Feisal had arrived with his camel corps and wished to see Lawrence.

THE VILLAGE OF DATE PALMS
(Nakhl Mubarak)

Copyright

They went through the village and came on a wild noisy confusion of men and camels: pressing through these they suddenly found themselves in a dry but still slimy river-bed where the army was encamped, filling the valley from side to side. There were hundreds of fires of crackling thorn-wood with Arabs eating or making coffee or sleeping close together muffled in their cloaks. Camels were everywhere, couched or tied by one leg to the ground, with new ones always coming in and the old ones jumping up on three legs to join them, roaring with hunger and alarm. Caravans were being unloaded, patrols going out, and dozens of Egyptian mules were bucking angrily in the middle of the scene. In a calm region in the middle of the river-bed was Feisal, sitting on his carpet with Maulud the Mesopotamian patriot and a silent cousin, Sharraf, who was the chief magistrate of Taif. Feisal was dictating to a kneeling secretary while at the same time another secretary was reading the latest reports aloud by the light of a silvered lamp held by a slave.

Feisal, quiet as ever, welcomed Lawrence with a smile until he could finish his dictation. After it was done he apologized for the confusion and waved the slaves back so that the talk could be private. The slaves and onlookers cleared a space, but at that moment a wild camel broke through the ring, plunging and trumpeting. Maulud dashed at its head to drag it away, but it dragged him instead, and its load coming untied, an avalanche of camel-fodder came pouring over the lamp, Lawrence and Feisal’s cousin. Feisal said gravely, ‘God be praised that it was neither butter nor bags of gold.’ Then he explained what had happened in the last twenty-four hours.

A big Turkish column had slipped behind the barrier of Harb tribesmen on guard in the valley where Lawrence had first met Feisal, and cut their retreat. The tribesmen farther down the valley panicked; instead of holding up the Turks by sniping from the hills they ran away in two’s and three’s to save their families before it was too late. Turkish mounted men rushed down the valley to Zeid’s headquarters, and nearly caught Zeid asleep in his tent: however, he got warning in time and managed to hold up the attack while most of his tents and baggage were packed on camels and driven away. Then he escaped himself; his army became a loose mob. They rode wildly towards Yenbo, which was three days’ journey away, by the road south of the one that Lawrence had just taken.

Feisal hearing the news had rushed down here to protect the main road to Yenbo which now lay open: he had only arrived an hour before Lawrence. He had five thousand men with him and the Egyptian gunners, the Turks perhaps had three or four thousand. But his spy-system was breaking down—the Harb tribesmen were bringing in wild and contradictory reports—and he had no idea whether the Turks would attack Yenbo, or leave it alone and attack Rabegh, a hundred and twenty miles down the coast, and so go on to Mecca. The best that could happen would be if they heard of Feisal’s presence here and wasted time trying to catch his main army (which was what the military textbooks would have advised) while Yenbo had time to put up proper defences.

Meanwhile he sat here on his carpet and did all he could. He listened to the news, and settled all the petitions, complaints and difficulties that came up before him. This went on until half-past four in the morning, when it grew very cold in the damp valley and a mist rose, soaking every one’s clothes. The camp gradually settled down for the night. Feisal finished his most urgent work, and the party, after eating a few dates, curled up on the wet carpet and went to sleep. Lawrence, shivering, saw Feisal’s guards creep up and spread their cloaks gently over Feisal when they were sure that he was asleep. Awake, he would have refused such luxury.

An hour later the party rose stiffly and the slaves lit a fire of the ribs of palm-leaves to warm them. Messengers were still coming in from all sides with rumours of an immediate attack and the camp was not far off panic. So Feisal decided to move, partly because if it rained in the hills they would be flooded out, partly to work off the general restlessness. His drums beat, the camels were loaded hurriedly. At the second drum, every one leapt into the saddle and drew off to right or left, leaving a broad lane down which Feisal rode on his mare; his cousin followed a pace behind him. Then came a wild-looking standard-bearer with a face like a hawk and long plaits of black hair falling on either side of his face: he was dressed in bright colours and rode a tall camel. Behind was a bodyguard of eight hundred men. Feisal chose a good camping-ground not far off, to the north of the village of the date-palms.

The next two days Lawrence spent with Feisal and got a close view of his methods of dealing with a badly shaken army. He restored their lost spirits by his never-failing calm courage and listened to every man who came with petitions. He did not cut them short even when they put their troubles into verse and sang songs of many stanzas at his tent door. This extreme patience taught Lawrence much. Feisal’s self-control seemed equally great. One of Zeid’s principal men came in to explain the shameful story of their flight. Feisal just laughed at him in public and sent him aside to wait while he saw the sheikhs of the Harb and of the Ageyl whose carelessness in letting the Turks get by in the first place had brought about the disaster. He did not reproach them, but chaffed them gently about the fine show they had put up and the fine losses that they had suffered. Then he called back Zeid’s messenger and lowered the tent-flap to show that this was private business.

Lawrence remembering that Feisal’s name meant ‘the sword flashing down at the stroke’ was afraid that an angry scene would follow, but Feisal merely made room for the messenger on the carpet and said, ‘Come and give us more of your Arabian Nights’ Entertainment: amuse us.’ The man, falling into the spirit of the joke, began to describe young Zeid in flight, the terror of a certain famous brigand with him, and, greatest disgrace of all, how the venerable father of Ali ibn el Hussein had lost his coffee-pots; one of the ‘children of Harith’ too!

At Feisal’s camp the routine was simple. Just before dawn a man with a harsh powerful voice who was prayer leader for the whole army would climb to the top of the little hill above the sleeping army and utter a tremendous call to prayers, which went echoing down the valley. As soon as he ended, Feisal’s own prayer-leader called gently and sweetly from just outside the tent. In a minute, Feisal’s five slaves (who were actually freedmen, but preferred to go on serving) brought cups of sweetened coffee. An hour or so later, the flap of Feisal’s sleeping tent would be raised, his invitation to private callers. Four or five would be present and after the morning’s news came a tray of breakfast. Breakfast was mainly dates; sometimes Feisal’s Circassian grandmother would send up a batch of her famous spiced cakes from Mecca, sometimes a slave would cook biscuits. After breakfast little cups of syrupy green tea and bitter coffee went round while Feisal dictated the morning’s letters to his secretary. Feisal’s sleeping tent was an ordinary bell-tent furnished merely with a camp-bed, cigarettes, two rugs and a prayer carpet.

At about eight o’clock Feisal would buckle on his ceremonial dagger and walk across to the big reception tent, which was open at one side. He sat at the end of this, his principal men spreading out to left and right with their backs against the sides of the tent. The slaves regulated the crowd of men who came with petitions or complaints. If possible, business was over by noon.

Feisal and his household, which included Lawrence, then went back to the other of his two private tents, the living tent, where dinner was brought. Feisal ate little but smoked much. He pretended to be busy with the beans, lentils, spinach, rice, or sweet cakes until he judged that his guests had eaten. He then waved his hand and the tray disappeared. Slaves came forward to wash the eaters’ hands with water: the desert Arabs use their fingers for eating. After dinner there was talk, with more coffee and tea. Then till two o’clock Feisal retired to his living tent and pulled down the flap to show that he was not to be disturbed, after which he returned to the reception tent to the same duties as before. Lawrence never saw an Arab come away from Feisal’s presence dissatisfied or hurt; and this meant not only tact on Feisal’s part but a very long memory. In giving judgment he had to recall exactly who every man was, how he was related by birth or marriage, what possessions, what character he had, the history and blood feuds of his family and clan; and Feisal never seemed to stumble over facts. After this was over, if there was time, he would go out walking with his friends, talking of horses or plants, looking at camels or asking someone the names of rocks and ridges and such-like in the neighbourhood.

At sunset came the evening prayer and afterwards, in his living tent, Feisal planned what patrols and raiding parties were going out that night. Between six and seven came the evening meal: it was like dinner except that cubes of boiled mutton were mixed in the great tray of rice. Silence was kept until the meal was over. This meal ended the day except for occasional glasses of tea. Feisal did not sleep till very late and never hurried his guests away. He relaxed in the evening and avoided work as much as he could. He would send for some local sheikh to tell stories of tribal history; or the tribal poets would sing their long epics, stock pieces which, with the change of names only, did service for every tribe in Arabia. Feisal was passionately fond of Arabic poetry and would often provoke competitions, judging and rewarding the best verses of the night. Very rarely he would play chess—the game was brought to Europe first by the Arabs—swiftly and brilliantly. Sometimes he told stories of what he had seen in Syria, or scraps of Turkish secret history, or family affairs. Lawrence learned from him a great deal about people and parties among the Arabs that was useful to him later.

Feisal asked Lawrence if he would wear Arab dress like his own while in the camp: it was more comfortable, and more convenient because the tribesmen only knew khaki as Turkish uniform and every time that Lawrence went into Feisal’s tent and strangers were there an explanation had to be made. Lawrence gladly agreed and Feisal’s slave fitted him out in splendid white silk wedding-garments embroidered with gold which had lately been sent to his master, possibly as a hint, by a great-aunt in Mecca. Arab clothes were not a novelty to Lawrence. He had frequently worn them in Syria before the War.

X

He decided to go back to Yenbo to organize the defence because Feisal’s stand could not be more than a short pause. With the hills undefended the Turks could strike where and when they pleased, and they were much better armed and better trained than Feisal’s Arabs. So Feisal lent him a fine bay camel and he raced back by a more northerly route, for fear of Turkish patrols that were reported to have pushed round to the road by which he had come. He arrived at Yenbo just before dawn, in time to see Zeid’s beaten army ride in, about eight hundred camel fighters, without noise but apparently without any sense of shame at their defeat. Zeid himself pretended to be less concerned about it than anyone else: as he rode in he remarked to the Governor, ‘Why! your town is half in ruins. I must telegraph to my father for forty masons to repair the public buildings,’ and this he actually did. Meanwhile Lawrence had telegraphed to Captain Boyle at Jiddah that Yenbo was threatened and Boyle promptly replied that he would come there at once with his fleet. Then came more bad news: Feisal had been attacked in force before his troops had recovered from their fright: after a short fight he had broken off and was falling back on Yenbo. It seemed that the war was nearly over, the Revolt crushed. With Feisal were two thousand men, but Lawrence saw at once that the Juheina tribe was absent: there must have been treachery, a thing that neither Lawrence nor Feisal had believed possible from the Juheina.

Lawrence, though dead tired after three days with hardly any sleep, went to see Feisal at once and heard the news. The Turks had broken in from the south and threatened to cut Feisal off from Yenbo: their guide was a Juheina chief, hereditary lawgiver to the tribe, who had a private quarrel with the Emir of the Juheina. They had seven useful guns with which they shelled Feisal’s camp. Feisal, undismayed, held his ground and sent round the Juheina to work down the great valley to the left and fall on the Turkish right wing. He then posted the Egyptian gunners on the right and began to shell the palm groves, where the Turkish centre was concealed, with his own two guns. These guns were a present from Egypt, old rubbish, but good enough, it was thought, for the wild Arabs—like the sixty thousand rifles also sent which had been condemned as useless for the British Army after hard service at the Dardanelles.

A Syrian Arab, Rasim, who had once been in command of a Turkish battery, was working these guns but without sights, range-finder, range-tables or high explosive. He was using shrapnel, old stock left over from the Boer War, the copper fuses green with mould. Most of it burst short if it burst at all. However, Rasim had no means of getting his ammunition away if things went wrong, so he blazed away at full speed, shouting with laughter at this way of making war. The tribesmen were much impressed with the noise and smoke and Rasim’s laughter. ‘By God,’ said one, ‘those are the real guns: the importance of their noise!’ Rasim swore that the Turks were dying in heaps. The Arabs charged forward happily. Feisal was hoping for a big victory when suddenly the Juheina on his left under their Emir and Abd el Kerim, his brother, halted and finally turned and rode back to the camping-ground. The battle was lost: he called to Rasim to save the guns at least, and Rasim yoked up his teams and trotted off to the right towards Yenbo. After him streamed the centre and right, Feisal and his bodyguard bringing up the rear and leaving the cowardly or treacherous Juheina to look after themselves.

As the tale was still being told, and Lawrence was joining in the general curse against the Emir of the Juheina and Abd el Kerim, there was a stir at the door and who should come running in but Abd el Kerim himself! He kissed Feisal’s head-rope in greeting and sat down. Feisal stared and gasped and said ‘How?’ Abd el Kerim answered that the Juheina had been dismayed at Feisal’s sudden flight: he and his brother had been left to fight the Turks for the whole night alone, without artillery, and the gallant tribesmen had resisted until they were forced out of the date-palms by weight of numbers. Half the tribe were just coming along with his brother, the other half had gone inland, for water. ‘But why did you retreat to the camping-ground behind us during the battle?’ asked Feisal. ‘Only to make ourselves a cup of coffee: we had fought all day and it was dusk: we were very tired and thirsty.’ Feisal and Lawrence lay back and laughed; and then went to see what could be done to save Yenbo.

The first thing was to send the Juheina back to join their fellows and keep up a constant pressure on the Turkish communications with raids and sniping. The Turks would have to leave so many men behind, strung out in small garrisons, to guard their supplies, that by the time they reached Yenbo the defenders would be stronger than themselves. Yenbo was easy to defend by day at least; the town was on the top of a flat coral reef twenty feet above the sea, surrounded on two sides by water, and on the other two by a flat stretch of sand without any cover for the attackers. Guns were being landed from Boyle’s ships, of which he had brought five, and the Arabs were delighted with their size and number, and were much impressed by the fleet. All day long the whole army worked hard under Garland’s direction at the task of fortification, using the old town-wall as a rampart for the Arabs to defend under the protection of the naval guns. Barbed-wire entanglements were strung outside and machine-guns grouped in the bastions of the wall. There was great excitement and confidence, and nearly every one sat up all night. Lawrence himself was sound asleep on one of the ships.

There was one alarm that night at about eleven o’clock. The Arab outposts had met the Turks only three miles from the town. The garrison was roused by a crier and every man took his place quietly on the wall without a shout or a shot fired. The search-lights of the ships, which were anchored close to the town, crossed and re-crossed over the plain. But no further alarm was given and when dawn came it was found that the Turks had turned back. They had been frightened, it was discovered later, by the search-lights and the blaze of lighted ships crowding the harbour, and by the silence of the usually noisy Arabs. Yenbo was saved.

A few days later Boyle dispersed his ships, promising to bring them back at an hour’s notice to Yenbo if the Turks tried again. In one of these ships Lawrence went down to Rabegh, where he met the French Colonel. The Colonel was still trying to get a mixed British and French brigade landed to help the Arabs, and tried to convert Lawrence to his views. He said that so soon as Mecca was safe the Arabs ought not to be encouraged to go on further with the war, which the Allies could manage far better than they. His plan apparently was that if the brigade were landed at Rabegh, the Arab tribes would suspect Hussein of selling his province to the English and French and stop fighting for him. This brigade would then be his main defence against the Turks, and when the war against the Turks was won on the other battlefields, Hussein could be confirmed as King of Mecca and Medina as a reward for his loyalty. The Colonel’s general attitude seemed to be ‘We Allies must stick together and outwit these Arabs who are savages not worth the consideration of us Westerners.’

Lawrence thought that he saw the game. The Frenchman was afraid that if the Revolt were carried farther north to Damascus, Aleppo, Mosul, the Arabs might capture these cities from the Turks and keep them after the War; and they were cities that France wanted to add to her colonial empire. Moreover, in the Sykes-Picot Treaty, made between France, England and Russia in 1916 for dividing up the Turkish Empire after the War, the French had actually agreed that independent Arab governments, though in the French ‘sphere of influence,’ should be established in these cities if they were freed by the Arabs themselves—an event that none of the signatories thought possible at the time; it was a matter of form, merely, to suggest it. At the time Lawrence knew nothing of this treaty, which was a secret one, but he suspected the Frenchman, and he had no intention of letting the Arabs down for the sake of the Entente Cordiale. The Colonel, hearing of Lawrence’s and Feisal’s intention to continue with the plan of attacking Wejh that had been interrupted by the Turkish advance, did his best to discourage it. On his honour as a staff-officer (and he had a very distinguished record) he said that it was suicide to make such a move; and gave many reasons. Lawrence brushed him aside. He believed that the Arabs had a chance now of a wide and lasting success, and Wejh was the first step.

The Turks meanwhile were being hard pressed by the Juheina who, split up in small parties, made their lives wretched by constant raids, sniping, and looting of supplies: and British seaplanes began bombing their camp in the palm-groves of Nakhl Mubarak. They decided to attack Rabegh. There Feisal’s brother Ali, who had now nearly seven thousand men, was ready to advance against them, and Feisal and the younger brother Zeid planned to move round inland behind the Turks and take them in a trap. Feisal had difficulty with the Emir of the Juheina, whom he asked to move forward with him; the Emir was jealous of Feisal’s growing power with the tribes. But Feisal made them move without their Emir. He then rode south to raise the Harb. All was going well until he heard from Ali that his army had gone a little way forward when, hearing false reports of treachery, it had rushed back in disorder to Rabegh. Feisal could do nothing, he could not even count for certain on the Harb, who might join the Turks if they got the chance and whose territory ran down south of Rabegh.

Then Colonel Wilson, who was British representative in the province, came up to Yenbo from Jiddah and begged Feisal to leave the Turks alone and make the attack on Wejh. The plan was now to move up with the whole Juheina fighting force and the regular battalions from Yenbo; the British Fleet would give all the help it could. Feisal saw that Wejh could be taken in this way, but Yenbo was left defenceless; he pointed out that the Turks were still able to strike and that Ali’s army seemed to have little fight in it, and might not even defend Rabegh, which was the bulwark of Mecca. However, Colonel Wilson gave Feisal his word that Rabegh would be kept safe with naval help until Wejh had fallen, and Feisal accepted it. He saw that the attack on Wejh was the best diversion that the Arabs could make to draw the Turks off Mecca, and started at once; at the same time sending his brother Abdulla machine-guns and stores and asking him to move to the impregnable hills sixty miles north of Medina, Juheina territory, where his forces could both threaten the railway and continue to hold up the eastern supply caravans.

The Turks were still making for Rabegh, but very slowly, and with an increasing sick list among the men and animals, due to overwork and poor food. They were also losing an average of forty camels a day and twenty men killed and wounded in raids by the Harb tribes in their rear. They were eighty miles from Medina and, as Lawrence had foreseen, each mile that they went forward made their lines of communication more exposed to attack. Their pace got slower and slower till it was no more than five miles a day, and on the eighteenth of January 1917 they withdrew, when still thirty miles from Rabegh. It was Feisal’s and Abdulla’s new moves which finally recalled the expedition to Medina, and for the next two years until the War ended and the Holy City surrendered, the Turks were kept sitting helplessly in trenches outside it, waiting for an attack which never came.

XI

On New Year’s Day 1917 Feisal and Lawrence, who was still rather a foreign adviser than an actual fighter in the Arab cause, sat down at Yenbo to consider the Wejh expedition. The army now consisted of six thousand men, most of them mounted on their own camels. The first fierce eagerness had left them but they had gained in staying power, and the farther away they moved from their homes, the more regular their military habits became. They still worked independently, by tribes, only bound by goodwill to Feisal’s command, but when he came by, they now at least fell into a ragged line and together made the bow and sweep of the arm to the lips which was the Arab salute. They kept their weapons in good enough order, though they did not oil them, and looked after their camels properly. In mass they were not dangerous: in fact their use in battle lessened as their numbers increased. A company of trained Turks could defeat a thousand Arabs in open fighting, yet three or four Arabs in their own hills could hold up a dozen Turks.

After the battle of the date-palms it was decided not to mix Egyptian troops with Arabs. They did not go well together. The Arabs were apt to let the Egyptians do more than their share of the fighting because they looked so military; they would even wander away in the middle of a battle and leave them to finish it. So the Egyptian gunners were sent home (and went gladly), while their guns and equipment were handed over to Rasim, Feisal’s own gunner, and to Feisal’s machine-gun officer; who in their place formed Arab detachments mostly of Turk-trained Syrian and Mesopotamian deserters. Maulud got together a force of fifty mule-mounted men whom he called cavalry and, since they were townsmen and not Bedouin, soon made regular soldiers of them. They were so useful that Lawrence telegraphed to Egypt for fifty mules more.

Now although the Arabs were of less use in mass than in small groups, it was necessary to make this march on Wejh a huge parade of tribes to impress all Arabia. Feisal decided to take all the Juheina tribe and add enough of the Harb, Billi, Ateiba and Ageyl to make it the biggest expedition in Arab memory. It would be clear that the Revolt was now a real national movement, and when Wejh was taken and the tribes returned home with the news, there would be no more petty jealousies and desertions of clans to hinder the campaign. Feisal and Lawrence did not expect any hard fighting at Wejh because the Turks had no spare troops to send to its defence or time to send them. It would take them weeks to withdraw their Rabegh expedition—the hindering of which with Harb help was now Zeid’s occupation—and if the Arab army could reach Wejh in three weeks’ time, they would surely take it unprepared.

Lawrence was anxious to take part in a small raid on the Turks, just to get the feel of it for future information, so on January the second 1917 he set out with thirty-five tribesmen. They rode some miles south-east until they came to a valley near the Turkish lines of communication. Ten men stayed guarding the camels, while Lawrence and the remaining twenty-five climbed over the sharp-edged crumbling cliffs on the farther side of the valley to another valley, where a Turkish post was known to be. There they waited shivering for hours in the mist. When dawn came they saw the tips of a group of Turkish bell-tents, three hundred yards below, just showing over a small spur that lay between. They put bullets through these tent-tops, and when the Turks rushed out to man their trenches, shot at them; but the Turks ran so fast that probably few were hit. From the trenches the Turks fired back wildly and rapidly in all directions as if signalling for help to the nearest big Turkish garrison—there were garrisons strung all along the road for eighty miles back. As the enemy was ten times their number already, the raiders might soon have been cut off. Lawrence decided to do no more: they crawled back over the hill to the first valley, where they stumbled over two stray Turks and carried them back to Yenbo as prisoners.

That morning the army started for Weih, first making for a group of wells fifteen miles north of Yenbo. At their head rode Feisal dressed in white, his cousin beside him on the right in a red headcloth and reddish-yellow tunic and cloak, Lawrence on the left in white and scarlet. Next came three standard-bearers carrying an Arab flag of faded crimson silk with gilt spikes. Then the drummers playing a march, then the wild mass of Feisal’s bodyguard, twelve hundred bouncing well-fed camels, with coloured trappings, packed closely together, their riders dressed in every possible combination of bright colours. This bodyguard was of camel-men called the Ageyl. They were not a desert tribe but a company of young peasants from the oasis country of Central Arabia. They had signed on for a term of years first of all for service with the Turkish Army but had soon gone over in a body when the Revolt started. Having no blood enemies in the desert and being the sons of desert traders they were most useful in the later campaign.

Beside the road were lined the rest of the army, tribe by tribe, each man standing beside his couched camel waiting his turn to join the procession. They saluted Feisal in silence, and Feisal cheerfully called back ‘Peace be with you!’ and the head sheikhs returned the phrase. The procession swelled, the broad column filled the valley in length as far as the eye could see, and, the drums beating, every one burst into a loud chant in praise of Feisal and his family.

Lawrence went back on his racing camel to Yenbo: he had to make sure that the naval help for the attack on Wejh would be properly timed. But first of all, feeling anxious about a possible Turkish attack on deserted Yenbo, he got a big British vessel, the Hardinge, formerly a troopship, to take on board all the principal stores of the town, including eight thousand rifles, three million cartridges, thousands of shells, two tons of high explosive, quantities of rice and flour. Boyle promised to lend the Hardinge as a supply ship for the force on its way up the coast, landing food and water wherever needed. This solved the chief problem, which was how to maintain ten thousand men with only a small supply column; and, for the rest, Boyle promised that half the Red Sea fleet would mass at Wejh; landing-parties were already being trained.

The Billi tribesmen who lived about Wejh were friendly and knew moreover that if they did not welcome Feisal’s army it would be the worse for them, so it seemed certain now that Wejh would be taken. Boyle promised to take on board the Hardinge an Arab landing-party of several hundred Harb and Juheina tribesmen. While this was being settled Lawrence heard that the three regular British officers who had been instructed to help Feisal direct the campaign were now on their way from Egypt. One of these, Vickery, arrived first. He was an artillery officer, with a good knowledge of Arabic; and what Lawrence thought that the Arabs needed, a trained staff officer.

On the sixteenth of January Vickery, Boyle, Feisal, Maulud, Lawrence, met in Feisal’s camp, now half-way to Wejh, to discuss the advance. It was decided to break the army up into sections and send them forward one after the other, because of the difficulty of watering a whole army at the same time at the few wells or ponds on the line of march. These sections should then meet on the twentieth of January at a place fifty miles from Wejh where there was water, and make the last stage together. Boyle agreed to land tanks of water two days later at a small harbour only twelve miles from Wejh. On the twenty-third the attack was to be made; the Arab landing-party would go ashore from the Hardinge north of the town while Feisal’s mounted men cut all the roads of escape south and east. It all looked very promising and there was no news from Yenbo that was not good. Abdulla was moving up to his position north of Medina, and news came that he had just captured a well-known Turkish agent, a former brigand, who was going with bribes among the desert tribes, and was on his way to Yemen far down in the south where a Turkish garrison was cut off. Abdulla took with this man twenty thousand Turkish pounds in gold, robes of honour, costly presents, some interesting papers and camel loads of rifles and pistols. It was the greatest good fortune.

In the tent with Vickery and Boyle, Lawrence had forgotten his usual calm and said that in a year the Arab army would be tapping on the gates of Damascus. There was no response from Vickery, who was angered at what he thought was a romantic boast that could only come from a man like Lawrence who did not know his job as a soldier. Lawrence was disappointed in Vickery, who was so much a soldier that he did not realize what the Arab Revolt was. It was not like a war in which large trained armies, with complicated modern equipment, manœuvre from town to town, seeking each to destroy or cut off the other. It was more like a general strike over an immense area. The only big army was the Turkish and even that was not free to move about as it liked, because of the difficulties of the country. Lawrence knew that his boast had not been a vain one; five months later he was secretly in Damascus arranging for the help of its townsmen when Feisal’s forces should arrive to free them. And a year later he did in fact enter the city in triumph and become temporary governor. Vickery had not seen that with a grand alliance of Semites, an idea and an armed prophet, anything might happen. Had Lawrence only had a sounder military training than the casual reading of military history for his degree at Oxford (and in his teens the occasional captaincy of a non-militaristic Church Lads’ Brigade when his brother needed a substitute!) and if now he had been given a free hand, it would have been Constantinople and not Damascus that the Arabs should have reached. The conflict between Vickery and Lawrence, however, was not as between two British military advisers with different views. It was really as between a British military adviser and a white Arab; for though it was not quite clear yet to himself, this was what Lawrence was becoming.

The next morning there was trouble with the second batch of fifty mules which had arrived for Maulud and was landed by the Hardinge along with the other stores. The mules were sent without halters, bridles or saddles, and once ashore stampeded into the little town near by, where they took possession of the market-place and began bucking among the stalls. Fortunately among the stores taken for safety from Yenbo were spare ropes and bits, so that after an exciting tussle the mules were captured and tamed. The shops were reopened and the damage paid for.

Lawrence remained with Feisal’s army for the rest of the advance. From this half-way halt they started on January the eighteenth at midday. The Ageyl rode spread out in wings for two or three hundred yards to the right and left of Feisal’s party. Soon there came then a warning patter of drums from the right wing—it was the custom to set the poets and musicians on the wings—and a poet began to sing two rhyming lines which he had just invented, about Feisal and the pleasures that he would provide for the army at Wejh. The men with him listened carefully and took up the verse in chorus, repeating it three times with pride and satisfaction and challenge. Before they could sing it a fourth time, the rival poet of the left wing capped it with a rhyme in the same metre and sentiment. The left cheered with a roar of triumph, then the drums tapped again, the standard-bearers spread out their great crimson banners, and the whole bodyguard right, left and centre broke simultaneously into the Ageyl marching song. The Ageyl sang of their own towns left behind and the women whom they might never see again, and of the great perils ahead of them. The camels loved the rhythm of the song and quickened their pace, while it lasted, over the long desolate sand-dunes between mountains and sea.

Two horsemen came riding after them. Lawrence knew one of these as the Emir of the Juheina, the other he could not make out. But soon he recognized the red face, strong mouth and staring eyes of his old friend Colonel Newcombe of the Sinai surveying party, who was now come here as the chief British military adviser to the Arabs. Newcombe quickly became friendly with Feisal, and the rest of the journey was made even happier by his enthusiasm. Lawrence, comparing notes with him, was glad to find that they both had the same general views. The march was uneventful. Water was the one problem, and though water-scouts went ahead to find what they could, the advance was delayed by its scarcity, so that it was clear that Feisal would be two days late for the rendezvous with the Hardinge on the twenty-second. Newcombe rode ahead on a fast camel to ask the Hardinge to come again with its water-tanks on the twenty-fourth, and to delay the naval attack if possible until the twenty-fifth.

Many helpers joined Feisal during his advance; the Billi chiefs met him at their tribal boundary, and later Nasir rode up, the brother of the Emir of Medina. His family was respected in Arabia only second to the Sherifs of Mecca, being also descended from the Prophet but from the younger son of Mohammed’s only daughter. Nasir was the forerunner of Feisal’s movement; he had fired the first shot at Medina and was to fire the last shot beyond Aleppo, a thousand miles north, on the day that the Turks asked for an armistice. He was a sensitive, pleasant young man who loved gardens better than the desert and had been forced unwillingly into fighting since boyhood. He had been here blockading Wejh from the desert for the last two months. He and Feisal were close friends. His news was that the Turkish camel-corps outpost barring the advance had been withdrawn that day to a position nearer to the town.

The last three days of the advance were painful; the animals were without food for nearly three days, and the men came the last fifty miles on half a gallon of water and with nothing to eat: many of them were on foot. The Hardinge was at the rendezvous on the twenty-fourth and landed the water promised; but this did not go far. The mules were allowed first drink, and what little was left was given to the more thirsty of the foot-men. Crowds of suffering Arabs waited all that night at the water-tanks, in the rays of the search-lights, hoping for another drink if the sailors came again. But the sea was too rough for the ship’s boat to make another trip.

From the Hardinge Lawrence heard that the attack on Wejh had already been made the day before; for Boyle was afraid that the Turks would run away if he waited. As a matter of fact the Turkish Governor had already addressed the garrison saying that Wejh must be held to the last drop of blood: after his speech he had got up on his camel and ridden off in the darkness with the few mounted men whom he had with him, making for the railway a hundred and fifty miles inland across the mountains. The two hundred Turkish infantry left behind decided to follow his orders rather than his example, but they were outnumbered three to one and the fleet shelled them heavily. The landing was made by the sailors and the Arab force, and Wejh was taken. But the Hardinge had come away before the end, so the advancing force could not be sure whether it would find the town still in Turkish hands.

At dawn on the twenty-fifth the leading tribes halted at a spot a few miles from the town and waited for the others to come up. Various small scattered parties of Turks were met; most surrendered, only one put up a short fight. When they reached the ridge behind which Wejh lay, the Ageyl bodyguard dismounted, stripping off all their clothes except their cotton drawers, and advanced to the attack: their nakedness was protection against bullet wounds, which would strike cleaner this way. They advanced company by company, at the run, and in good order with an interval of four or five yards between each man. There was no shouting. Soon they reached the ridge-top without a shot fired. So Lawrence watching knew that the fighting was over.

The Arab landing-party was in possession of the town, and Vickery, who had directed the battle, was satisfied. But when Lawrence found that twenty Arabs and a British flying officer had been killed, he was not at all pleased. He considered the fighting unnecessary; the Turks would soon have had to surrender for want of food if the town had been surrounded, and the killing of dozens of Turks did not make up for the loss of a single Arab. The Arabs were not pressed men accustomed to be treated as cannon-fodder like most regular soldiers. The Arab army was composed rather of individuals, and its losses were not reckoned merely by arithmetic. And because kinship is so strong a force in the desert, twenty men killed meant a far wider range of mourning than a thousand names in an European casualty list. Moreover, the ships’ guns had smashed up the town badly, which was a great loss to the Arabs, who needed it as a base for their future attacks inland on the railway. The town’s boats and barges, too, had been sunk, so the landing of stores was a difficulty, and all the shops and houses had been looted by the Arab landing-party as a compensation for their losses. The townsmen were mostly Egyptians who could not make up their minds in time to join the Arab cause.

Still, Wejh was taken, the coast was cleared of Turks, and the march had been a great advertisement. Abd el Kerim of the Juheina who had come to Lawrence a week before to beg for a mule to ride, and had been put off with the promise ‘when Wejh is taken,’ had said almost regretfully, ‘We Arabs are a nation now’; the regret was for the good old days of tribal wars and raids which now were at an end. Feisal had very luckily stopped a private war between the Juheina and Billi just in time; the Juheina, seeing some camels grazing, had of old habit ridden out and driven them off. Feisal was furious and shouted to them to stop, but they were too excited to hear. He snatched his rifle and shot at the nearest man, who tumbled off his camel in fear; then the others checked their course. Feisal had the men up before him, beat the leaders with a camel-stick and restored the camels to the Billi. More than a nation the Arab army seemed to some of the tribesmen. ‘The whole world is moving up to Wejh,’ said one old man.

FEISAL’S ARMY ENTERING WEJH

Copyright

The success at Wejh stirred the British in Egypt to realize suddenly the value of the Revolt: the Commander-in-Chief remembered that there were more Turks fighting the Arabs than were fighting him. Gold, rifles, mules, more machine-guns and mountain-guns were promised: and in time sent, all except the mountain-guns, which were the most urgent need of all. Field-guns were no use because of the hilly roadless country of Western Arabia, but the British Army could, it seemed, spare no mountain-guns except a sort that fired only ten-pound shells, useless except against bows and arrows. It was maddening that the Turks should always be able to outrange the Arabs by three or four thousand yards. The French Colonel had some excellent mountain-guns at Suez with Algerian gunners, but would not send them unless an Allied brigade was landed at Rabegh to take over the conduct of the war from the Arabs. These guns were kept at Suez for a year; but then the French Colonel was recalled and his successor sent them; with their help the final victory was made possible. Meanwhile a great deal of harm was done to the reputation of the French, for every Arab officer passing through Suez on his way to Egypt or back saw these idle guns as a proof of French hostility to the Revolt.

But while the news of the taking of Wejh was still fresh, the French Colonel called on Lawrence at Cairo to congratulate him; he said that the success confirmed his opinion of Lawrence’s military talent and encouraged him to expect help in extending the success. He wanted to occupy Akaba with an Anglo-French force and naval help. Akaba was the port at the very extreme point of the Red Sea on the opposite side of the Sinai peninsula from Suez, and a brigade landed there might advance eighty miles inland towards Maan. Maan was an important town on the pilgrims’ railway about two hundred miles south of Damascus, and on the left flank of the Turkish army opposing the British on the borders of Palestine. Lawrence, who knew Akaba from his surveying days in the winter of 1913, told the Colonel that the scheme was impossible, because, though Akaba itself could be taken, the granite mountains behind it could be held by the Turks against any expedition trying to force the passes. The best thing was for Bedouin Arabs to take it from behind without naval help.

Lawrence suspected that the Colonel wanted to put this Anglo-French force in as a screen between the Arabs and Damascus, to keep them in Arabia wasting themselves in an attack on Medina. He himself, on the other hand, wanted to take them into Damascus and beyond. Both men knew what the other’s intention was, but there was a natural concealment of the real issue. At last the Colonel, rather unwisely, told Lawrence that he was going to Wejh to talk to Feisal, and Lawrence, who had not warned Feisal about French policy, decided to go too. By hurrying he was able to get there first and also to see and warn Newcombe.

When the Colonel arrived at Wejh eight days after Lawrence, he began by presenting Feisal with six Hotchkiss automatic guns complete with instructors. This was a noble gift, but Feisal asked for the quick-firing mountain-guns at Suez. The Frenchman put him off by saying that guns were no real use in Arabia; the thing to do was for the Arabs to climb about the country like goats and tear up the railway. Feisal was annoyed by the ‘goats,’ which is an insult in Arabic, and asked the Colonel if he had ever tried to ‘goat’ himself. The Colonel spoke of Akaba, and Feisal, who had had Lawrence’s account of the geography of the place, told him that it was asking too much of the British to get them to risk heavy losses over such an expedition. The Colonel, annoyed by Lawrence’s Oriental smile where he sat in a corner, pointedly asked Feisal to beg the British at least to spare the armoured cars which were at Suez. Lawrence smiled again and said that they had already started. Then the Colonel went away, defeated, and Lawrence returned to Cairo, where he begged the Commander-in-Chief not to send the brigade that was already waiting to be sent to Akaba. The Commander-in-Chief was delighted to find that this ‘side-show,’ too, was unnecessary.

Back again in Wejh a few days later Lawrence began hardening himself for his coming campaign, tramping barefoot over the coral or burning-hot sand. The Arabs wondered why he did not ride a horse, like every other important man. Feisal was busy with politics, winning over new tribes to the cause, keeping his father at Mecca in good humour, and his brothers in their places. He had to put down a small mutiny: the Ageyl had risen against their commander for fining and flogging them too heavily. They looted his tent and beat his servants, and then getting more excited remembered a grudge that they had against the Ateiba tribe and went off to do some killing. Feisal saw their torches and rushed to stop them, beating at them with the flat of his sword; his slaves followed. They subdued the Ageyl at last, but only by firing rockets from pistols among them, which set fire to their robes and frightened them. Only two men were killed; thirty were wounded. The commander of the Ageyl then resigned and there was no more trouble.

A wireless signalling set was mounted at Wejh by the Navy, and the two armoured cars from Suez arrived. They had just been released from the campaign in East Africa. The Arabs were delighted with the cars and with the motor-bicycles that were sent with them. They called the motor-bicycles ‘devil horses,’ the children of the cars, which were themselves the sons and daughters of the trains on the pilgrims’ railway. About this time came Jaafar, a Mesopotamian Arab from Bagdad, whom Feisal at once made commander-in-chief of the regular Arab forces under him. Jaafar had been in the Turkish army and had fought well against the British. He had been chosen by Enver to organize the Senussi tribes in the desert west of Egypt, and going by submarine had made the wild men into a good fighting force. The British captured him at last and he was imprisoned at Cairo. He tried to escape one night from the Citadel there, slipping down a blanket rope, but fell, hurt his leg, and was recaptured. Later in hospital he read a newspaper account of the Sherif’s Revolt and of the executions of Arab nationalists in Syria; he suddenly realized that he had been fighting on the wrong side.

Feisal’s politics were going well. The Billi tribe and the Moahib joined him and the Howeitat and Beni Atiyeh beyond, so that he now had control of the whole country between the railway and the sea from a point a hundred and fifty miles north of Wejh right down to Mecca. Beyond the Howeitat and Beni Atiyeh, to the north, and spreading over the wide gravel and lava desert to the borders of Mesopotamia lived the powerful Ruwalla tribe, whose Emir Nuri was one of the four great Arabian princes, the others being Ibn Saud of Nejd in the central oases, the Emir of Jebel Shammar, and the Sherif of Mecca. Nuri was a hard old man whose word was law and who could not be either bullied or coaxed; he had won his supremacy by the murder of two brothers. Fortunately he had been on good terms with Feisal for years, and Feisal’s messengers going to him to ask permission for the Arab army to pass through Ruwalla territory met Nuri’s messengers already on the way with a valuable gift of baggage camels for Feisal. Nuri could not give armed help at present because if the Turks suspected him they would half-starve his tribesmen in three months; but Feisal could count on him, when the right time came, for armed help too. It was most important to have Nuri friendly because he controlled Sirhan, the one great chain of camping-grounds and water-holes across the northern desert to the Syrian border, where lived the famous tribe, the Howeitat. One Howeitat clan, the Abu Tayi, was ruled by Auda, the greatest fighting man in Northern Arabia; and to get in touch with Auda had been Feisal’s and Lawrence’s ambition for months. With Auda friendly it should be possible to win over all the tribes between Maan and Akaba, and then, after taking Akaba, to carry revolt farther north still behind the Turkish lines in Syria. And Auda did prove friendly; his cousin came in with presents on the seventeenth of February 1917, and the same day arrived a chief of another Howeitat clan that was settled near Maan. Further arrivals that day were Sherarat tribesmen from the desert between Wejh and the railway with a gift of ostrich eggs, Nuri’s son with the gift of a mare, and the chief of another Howeitat clan from the coast south of Akaba. This last chief brought Feisal the spoils of the two Turkish posts on the Red Sea which he had just taken.

The roads to Wejh swarmed with messengers and volunteers and great sheikhs riding in to swear allegiance, and the Billi, who had hitherto only been lukewarm in the cause, caught the enthusiasm of the rest. Feisal’s way of swearing in new converts was to hold the Koran between his hands, which they kissed and promised ‘We shall wait while you wait and march when you march. We shall yield obedience to no Turk. We shall deal kindly with all who speak Arabic whether Arabians, Mesopotamians, Syrians or others. We shall put Arab independence above life, family or goods.’ When the chiefs came to Feisal it happened sometimes that blood-enemies met in his presence, when he would gravely introduce them and later act as peacemaker, striking a balance of profit and loss between them. He would even help things on by contributing from his own purse for the benefit of the tribe that had suffered most loss. For two years this peace-making was Feisal’s daily task, the combining of the thousands of hostile forces in Arabia against a common enemy. There was no feud left alive in the districts through which he passed, and no one ever questioned his justice. He was recognized as a power above tribal jealousies and quarrels, and finally gained authority over the Bedouin from Medina in the south to a point far beyond Damascus.

XII

Early in March information came to Lawrence from Egypt that Enver the Turkish Commander-in-Chief had ordered the Turks to leave Medina at once. The message had been intercepted on the pilgrims’ railway, where Newcombe and Garland were already busy with Arab help blowing up bridges and tearing up the rails. The Turks were ordered to march out in mass along the line with railway trains enclosed in their columns; they were to go for four hundred miles north to a station (Tebuk) below Maan where they would form a strong left flank to the army facing the British. As the Turks in Medina were a whole Army-Corps of the best Anatolian troops with a great deal of artillery, the British were anxious to keep them away. So Feisal was therefore begged (and Lawrence instructed) either to take Medina at once or to destroy the garrison on its way up the line. Feisal replied that he would do his best, though the Turkish message was days old and the move was already timed to begin. Feisal’s forces were, at the moment, all moving forward to harry the railway inland from Weih along a length of a hundred and fifty miles; so that the second part of the demand from Egypt was being met. If it was not too late to catch the Turks coming out it might be possible to destroy the whole force. The Arabs would damage the railway line until it was too hopelessly broken for the store trains to pass, and the Turks would therefore be without supplies to take them farther. When they turned back they would find the line broken behind them too. Lawrence himself decided to go to Abdulla, who had now moved to a position just north-west of Medina, to find out whether it was possible, if the Turks were still in Medina, to attack them there.

When he started he was very weak with dysentery brought on by drinking the bad water at Wejh: he had a high temperature and also boils on his back which made camel-riding painful. With a party of thirteen men, of various tribes, including four Ageyl and a Moor, he set out at dawn through the granite mountains on his hundred and-fifty-mile ride. He had two fainting fits on the way and could hardly keep in the saddle. At one point on the journey the ill-assorted party began to quarrel and the Moor treacherously murdered one of the Ageyl. A hurried court-martial was held and the Moor was privately executed, with general consent, by a member of the party who had no kin for the other Moors in Feisal’s army to start a blood-feud against.

One can well imagine Lawrence’s loneliness on this ride. He was no longer merely a British officer; his enthusiasm for the Revolt on its own account had cut him off from that. Nor was he a genuine Arab, as his tribelessness reminded him only too strongly. He hovered somewhere midway between the one thing and the other like Mohammed’s coffin in the fable. More immediately disturbing was the possibility of being too ill to ride further, and so of falling into the hands of desert tribesmen whose idea of medicine was to burn holes in the patient’s body to let the evil spirits out: when the patient screamed they would say that it was the devil in him protesting. Eventually he reached Abdulla’s camp just in time to stave off the collapse. He gave Abdulla Feisal’s message and then went off to lie in a tent where his weakness kept him helpless for the next ten days.

This forced idleness had important results: though his body was weak, his brain cleared and he began to think about the Arab Revolt more carefully than he had yet done. It was something to do to keep his mind off his physical condition. Hitherto he had acted from instinct, never looking more than a step or two ahead at a time: now he could exercise his reason. He remembered the military writers whose works he had read at Oxford: he had not been required by his tutors to become acquainted with any campaigns later than Napoleon’s, but he had, it seems, out of curiosity read most of the more modern military writers, such as the great Clausewitz, and von Moltke and the recent Frenchmen, including Foch (whose Principes de la Guerre had impressed him much until he found that Foch had, without acknowledgment, lifted many of his chief principles from an Austrian report on the 1866 campaign). He began by recalling the main principle on which all these writers agreed, that wars were won by destroying the enemy’s main army in battle. But somehow it would not fit the Arab campaign; and this worried him.

He began to ask himself why they were bothering to attack Medina. What was the good of it to the Arabs if they captured it? It was no longer a threat as it had been when there were troops in it to spare for the attack on Mecca. It was no use as a base or a store-house. The Turks in it were powerless to harm the Arabs, and were now eating their own transport animals which they could no longer feed. Why not let them keep the town? Why do more than continue to blockade it? What of the railway, which used up a vast quantity of men in guard posts all down the line and yet was too long to be properly defended? Why not be content with frequent raids on it, between guard posts, blowing up trains and bridges, and yet allowing it to be just—only just—kept in working order, so that it would be a continual drain on the Turks to the north to keep it going and to feed the troops in Medina? To cut it permanently would be a mistake. The surrender of Medina would mean that the captured Turks would have to be fed, many of the troops guarding the railway would make their way back north, and the drain on the Turks of men and trains and food would stop. The Allied cause would, in fact, be best served by attracting and keeping as many Turkish troops as possible in this unimportant theatre of war, and by using as many Arabs as possible in the important theatre of war, which was Palestine.

When Lawrence got better, therefore, and left his stinking, fly-swarmed tent he did not urge Abdulla to attack Medina but suggested a series of pin-pricking raids against the railway, offering to set an example in these himself. Abdulla was more a politician than a man of action and more interested in field sports and practical joking than in generalship. However, he permitted Sherif Shakir, his picturesque half-Bedouin cousin, to make a raid against the nearest station on the railway, a hundred miles away, with a party of Ateiba tribesmen and one of the mountain-guns which the Egyptian gunners had left with Feisal and which Feisal had lately sent to Abdulla as a present. Lawrence, convalescent, went with Shakir, and, on the twenty-seventh of March, laid his first mine, an automatic one, on the railway. Because it was his first it was not very successful. He caught the front wheel of a train all right, but the charge was not big enough to do serious damage. Nor did Shakir succeed in his raid beyond killing a score of Turks, damaging the water-tower and station buildings with his gun, and setting a few wagons on fire; there was, that is to say, no looting. The chief dramatic interest of the raid seems to have centred round a shepherd boy who was captured by the Arabs and tied up while his sheep, Turkish property, were eaten before his unhappy eyes. However, Lawrence went again a day or two later with a party of Juheina to experiment further in automatic mines: he was fortunate enough to have a preliminary failure. A long train from Medina, full of women and children, ‘useless mouths’ whom the Turks could not feed and so were sending up to Syria, passed over the mine without exploding it. There had been a cloudburst the day before, in which Lawrence and his men had been caught, and the mechanism, owing probably to the slight sinking of the ground after the rain, was not in touch with the rails. He adjusted this when night came and, blowing up a few rails and a small bridge to explain plausibly to the Turks (who had seen them and were firing and blowing bugles all down the line) what he and the tribesmen were about, went away and left the mine behind. It caught the expected repair-train. Most of this story, the episodes of the two months, March and April 1917, which are left blank in Revolt in the Desert, are accessible, in greater detail, to inquisitive readers. The World’s Work magazine published them as an article in America in 1921. The fees for this contribution and three others following went not to Lawrence but to keep a poet, who had lost money in an attempt to start a grocery-shop, from the bankruptcy court. Lawrence took great care, for some reason, not to let them appear in England; and as I was the poet, and this book has the same text for England and America, the details will not be given by me now.

The fruits of Lawrence’s visit to Abdulla, measured in action, were small. Abdulla did not have his brother Feisal’s energy and military keenness, and had been allotted an unattractive part in the campaign, the blockade of Medina, which encouraged the inactive side of his character. (The siege of the city was never pressed and dragged on until after the Armistice in October 1918 when the commander, Fakhri Pasha, was given orders from Constantinople to hand Medina over to the Arab forces; and did so, compelled by a mutiny of his chief staff-officers.) But, apart from action, Lawrence’s visit to Abdulla was of considerable importance; it marked a turning-point in the Arab campaign. His fortnight’s solitary thinking in that tent gave him convictions: he decided on the tactics and strategy necessary if his party were to achieve that success in the north which he regarded as essential to justify the Arab Revolt. We find him acting hereafter with great deliberation and confidence, in striking contrast to his previous hesitating attitude as adviser to Feisal in the Yenbo and Wejh operations. He had been right before, but more or less by luck.

On April the tenth Lawrence returned to Wejh by leisurely stages. Abdulla had been very hospitable, but Lawrence preferred the atmosphere of Feisal’s camp, where there was a more energetic spirit and a determination to win the war with as little Allied help as possible. A good way farther north on the railway than he had laid his mines there were now two parties doing demolitions (Garland’s and Newcombe’s, and Hornby’s), but the Turks would find it just a shade less difficult to keep the railway going between Damascus and Medina than to arrange for the long and dangerous march-out of the Medina garrison. At Wejh he found things going on well. More armoured cars had come from Egypt, and Yenbo and Rabegh had been emptied of their stores and men as a proof that the Revolt was now safe in the south and was moving north. The aeroplanes under Major Ross were here and also a new machine-gun company of amusing history. When Yenbo was abandoned there were left behind some heaps of broken weapons and two English armourer-sergeants. Also thirty sick and wounded Arabs. The armourer-sergeants, finding things boring, had dosed and healed the men and mended the machine-guns, and combined them into a company. The sergeants knew no Arabic but trained the men so well by dumb-show that they were as good as the best company in the Arab army.

XIII

Lawrence was about to withdraw from Feisal’s tent at Wejh after the exchange of news and greetings, when there was a stir of excitement. A messenger came in and whispered to Feisal. Feisal turned to Lawrence with shining eyes, trying to be calm, and said: ‘Auda is here.’ The tent-flap was drawn back, and a deep voice boomed out salutations to ‘Our Lord, the Commander of the Faithful,’ then entered a tall strong figure, with a haggard face, passionate and tragic. It was Auda; and with him Mohammed, his only surviving son, a boy of eleven years old, already a fighting man. Feisal had sprung to his feet, an honour not due to Auda on account of his rank, for nobler chiefs had been received sitting, but because he was Auda, the greatest fighting man in Arabia. Auda caught Feisal’s hand and kissed it; then they drew aside a pace or two and looked at each other, a splendidly unlike pair, Feisal the prophet, and Auda the warrior, each true to his type. They had an immediate understanding and liking for each other at this first meeting.

AUDA

from a drawing by ERIC KENNINGTON

Auda was simply dressed in white cotton robes and a red headcloth. He looked over fifty and his black hair was streaked with white: yet he was straight and vigorous, and as active as a much younger man. His hospitality was such that only very hungry guests did not find it inconvenient; his generosity kept him poor in spite of the profits of a hundred raids. He had married twenty-eight times, and had been wounded thirteen times. He had killed seventy-five men with his own hand in battle and never a man except in battle. These were all Arabs; Turks he did not count and could not guess at the score. Nearly all his family and kin had been killed in the wars which he had provoked. He made a point of being at enmity with nearly all the tribes of the desert so that he might have proper scope for raids, which he made as often as possible. There was always an element of foresight in his maddest adventures, and his patience in battle was great. If he got angry his face would twitch uncontrollably and he would burst into a fit of shaking passion which could only be calmed by battle: at such times he was like a wild beast and men fled from his presence. Nothing on earth could make him change his mind or obey an order or do anything of which he disapproved. He saw life as an epic in which he took a leading part, though indeed he believed his ancestors even mightier men than himself. His mind was stored with old ballads of battle, and he was always singing them in his great voice to the nearest listener or to the empty air. He spoke of himself in the third person and was so sure of his fame that he would even shout out stories against himself. He had a demon of mischief worse even than Lawrence’s and in public gatherings would say the most reckless or tactless things that he could find to say: more than that, he would invent and utter on oath dreadful tales of the private life of his hosts or guests. Yet even those whom he most embarrassed loved him warmly; for he was modest, simple as a child, honest, kind-hearted.