Churchill's Wizards (14 page)

Lawrence was particularly interested in those Turkish army units whose Arab officers might not be wholly loyal to the Ottoman Empire. While in Cairo, he claimed to have learned from a defector from the Turkish side at Gallipoli, Lieutenant Muhammad Sharif al Faruki, that there were other members of Syrian secret societies dedicated to Arab nationalism among the Turkish soldiers sent to reinforce the Caucasus front against Russia at the end of 1915. Robert Graves stated in
Lawrence and the Arabs
that the fall of Erzerum in eastern Turkey to Russian forces was somehow ‘arranged' by Lawrence, and Lawrence himself claimed that he had ‘put the Grand Duke Nicholas [of Russia] in touch with certain disaffected Arab officers in Erzerum. Did it through the War Office and our Military Attaché in Russia.' In his biography of Lawrence, B. H. Liddell Hart wrote:

It is hard to establish what the facts of the matter were. Both Graves and Lawrence were prone to exaggeration and romancing.

1916 was a year of rebellions; the Irish rose at Easter in Dublin and were hanged; the Arab Revolt flared up early in June. Sharif Hussein, fearing he was about to be deposed by the Turks, gave the signal for his four sons, Ali, Abdulla, Feisal and Zeid, and thousands of Hijaz tribesmen to attack the Turkish garrisons in the west of the Arabian peninsula. Mecca, Jeddah, Rabegh and Yenbo eventually fell to the Sharif's forces, with help from British Royal Navy ships and seaplanes. But the rebels did not gain the support of all Arabs; most chose to stay loyal to the Ottoman Sultan. There were no desertions from the Turkish army, and the Sharif's rival, Ibn Saud, did not join in. Nor were the rebels able to take the holy city of Medina, which was the terminus of the Hijaz railway.

This German-engineered, solidly made, 42-inch permanent track (completed in 1908) ran along the old Derb el-Haj, the pilgrims' camel route over 800 miles south from Damascus to Medina via Deraa and Maan, traversing some 2,000 bridges and culverts that were cut and dressed from the local stone. When the railway was built, the pious might have believed that the shining rails were, as they were told, the Turkish Sultan's generous gift to the Arabs of the Caliphate, providing them with easier transport for the Haj. But the more cynical noticed that the railway stations, set about eleven miles apart, were fort-like blockhouses with rifle-slot windows and water towers that doubled as look-out posts. In fact, the pilgrim-route railway line was the Ottoman military's direct way of shifting troops and supplies down from Damascus, Aleppo and Istanbul. The Turks, wrote Lawrence,

In late September 1916, a Turkish expeditionary force set out from Medina to march the 250 miles down the main western road to recapture Mecca, and began pushing the Sharif's rebel Arabs back. The British feared that if the Turks succeeded in recapturing Mecca, the German message –
Gott strafe England
– would be in all the Friday prayers in every mosque around the world. Old British Empire hands like General Sir Reginald Wingate were genuinely alarmed by the dangers of jihad. Wingate, soon to become High Commissioner in Egypt after seventeen years as Governor General and Sirdar of the Sudan, had run a formidable intelligence service there since 1887, and written a case study of Islamist fundamentalism,
Mahdiism and the
Egyptian Sudan
.

There seemed to be some evidence for Wingate's fears. Across the Arabian Gulf, the Turks had invaded Aden Protectorate, threatening the British naval station there. The Germans had sent Major Freiherr Othman von Stotzingen to Yemen, to set up a wireless station to communicate with German troops in German East Africa, and spread propaganda among Muslims in the Horn of Africa. Also, Lij Iyasu in Abyssinia wanted to turn that Christian state into a Muslim one. Lij Iyasu and the Muslim Somalis might well lend support to the Germans running rings round the British in Tanganyika. There were Muslims in
the Sudan like the troublesome Sultan Ali Dinar of Darfur and among the rebellious Senussi in western Egypt, men whose disaffections could easily be stirred up. Further east, the Germans had crossed Persia to Kabul in order to persuade the neutral Emir of Afghanistan to raise an army to invade India where there were millions of Muslims. Weren't the ‘Hindustani fanatics' of the North-West Frontier of India already known to be under the influence of Wahhabi mullahs from Arabia? The discovery by Indian Intelligence in 1915 of letters urging Jihad from a known troublemaker with contacts in Jeddah, Maulana Obaidullah Sindhi, written on yellow silk and sewn into the coat of a student called Abdul Haq, travelling from Kabul, led to the arrest of over 220 Islamists in northern India. It seemed to people like Wingate that Jihad could erupt, right across Africa and Asia, stirred by German troublemaking.

So, to prevent
Deutschland über Allah
, it was vital that Mecca should not be recaptured. The British wanted to reinvigorate the Arab Revolt against the Turks without committing Christian troops to the Muslim heartland. There were disagreements between the Foreign Office and the War Office: should soldiers be sent to save face, or was the whole thing just a minor sideshow? In the end the Arab Bureau in Cairo took charge of things. The Arab Bureau, a ‘hybrid intelligence office', was set up by the director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral Reginald ‘Blinker' Hall, in 1916 with Gilbert Clayton as its chief, the
Arab Bulletin
as its restricted-circulation intelligence journal and T. E. Lawrence as one of its junior members. Located in the Savoy Hotel, Cairo, the Arab Bureau was a jangling place of ‘incessant bells and bustle and running to and fro' that another member, Aubrey Herbert, likened to ‘an oriental railway station'. It was Hall who dispatched Gertrude Bell, the celebrated Arabist who had made six desert journeys and knew about the tribes of Syria, Mesopotamia, northern and central Arabia, to join the Arab Bureau. Hall also recruited to the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve the calm and impressive Oxford archaeologist David Hogarth, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum and Fellow of Magdalen College (described by Lawrence as ‘Mentor to all of us'). Reginald Hall saw the strategic and naval importance of the Hijaz: if the Germans and Turks managed to set up a submarine base on the Red Sea coast, they could harry the British Empire's vital marine traffic to and from the Suez Canal.

The Arab Bureau therefore supported the Arab rebellion with crates of weaponry delivered by the Royal Navy: 54,000 rifles and 20 million rounds of ammunition in the first six months. They also sent the so-called ‘cavalry of St George', British gold sovereigns, £1 sterling coins, each of which bore the mounted figure of the dragon-slayer on the obverse. The first £10,000 had been delivered to Jeddah early in June 1916 on board HMS
Dufferin
. The field treasury that doled out later instalments was a small stone and cement building in Akaba, piled up to the ceiling with dozens of squat ammunition boxes. Each box contained five canvas bags; each sealed bag held £1,000. Peake Pasha of the Egyptian Camel Corps described signing a chit and getting a special leather holster to carry the jingling swag back to his tribal mercenaries. In all, Great Britain spent some £11 million bribing Arabs in WW1.

A high-level British mission arrived from Egypt across the Red Sea in mid-October 1916 to ginger up the Arab Revolt. The party was led by Ronald Storrs, the waspish diplomat whom T. E. Lawrence called ‘the most brilliant Englishman in the Near East' (but whom Aubrey Herbert dubbed ‘the Monster of the Levant'). Wearing tropical whites stained scarlet up the back from sweating on a red leather seat, he had been engaged in pistol practice against bottles on the deck of the ship with Abdul Aziz el-Masri, an Arab Nationalist who had defected from the Turkish Army and was now, briefly, a General for Sharif Hussein.

Captain Lawrence, now a 28-year-old intelligence officer, had taken ten days' leave to come along for the jaunt. Storrs described him in his contemporaneous diary as ‘little Lawrence my supercerebral companion'. This voyage to Jeddah by ship was the beginning of Lawrence's first visit to Arabia.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, Lawrence's account of the Arab Revolt, is subtitled ‘A Triumph', but it is really an epic romance of failure. Like most aspects of Lawrence's life, it is the subject of burning debate: Robert Irwin thinks it a ‘great work' best considered as a novel. Its attitude to the truth is not journalistic, but literary. Edward Said suggested it was more literature than history. Lawrence himself felt ‘one craving all my life – for the power of self-expression in some imaginative form'. In the introductory chapter to
Seven Pillars
that he later suppressed, Lawrence says that the book was written as a work of suasion to inspire: ‘a designed procession of Arab freedom from Mecca to Damascus … an Arab war waged and led by Arabs for an Arab aim in Arabia'. The book became a work of Arab propaganda, and it required the appropriate Arab hero.

Lawrence met the sons of Sharif Hussein. ‘I found Abdulla too clever, Ali too clean, Zeid too cool.' On 23 October 1916, Lawrence says that he found his man. The third son, the patient and self-controlled Feisal (portrayed by Alec Guinness in David Lean's classic film about Lawrence), was the one required to regenerate the Revolt. Feisal had the fire and character to become the leader that the Arabs needed, and he also had the necessary political flexibility to support British interests. Lawrence lobbied Sir Reginald Wingate, the sirdar in Khartoum who was the GOC in Hijaz during the Arab Revolt, got approval from his line-manager in Intelligence, Gilbert Clayton in Cairo, and then went back to Arabia to play his part as Feisal's military adviser and liaison officer.

In chapter XX of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, Feisal suddenly asks Lawrence to start wearing Arab clothes like his own while in the desert camp, and Lawrence agrees ‘at once, very gladly'. His willingness to step into costume in December 1916 distinguishes the fluid Lawrence from the more rigid Captain Shakespear who had negotiated on Britain's behalf with Ibn Saud two years earlier. Shakespear was killed in a tribal clash, wearing his Lancers' khaki uniform and pith helmet, because he insisted on staying put, taking panoramic photographs with his clockwork mechanical plate-glass camera, rather than entering the ebb and flow of Arab battle.

In August 1917, the
Arab Bulletin
published ‘Twenty-Seven Articles', Lawrence's advice to other liaison officers and advisers who might work with the Bedu or Hijaz Arabs. What strikes the reader
today is its wise humility. It advocates paying attention to the Arabs, fitting in judiciously, not giving orders, and never manhandling them: ‘It is difficult to keep quiet when everything is being done wrong, but the less you lose your temper the greater the advantage.' The first article begins ‘Go easy for the first few weeks. A bad start is difficult to atone for,' and the second says: ‘Learn all you can about your Ashraf and Bedu. Get to know their families, clans and tribes, friends and enemies, wells, hills and roads. Do all this by listening and by indirect inquiry. Do not ask questions. Get to speak their dialect of Arabic, not yours.' The following nine articles are about deferential management, unobtrusively dealing with the leader: ‘Wave a Sherif in front of you like a banner and hide your own mind and person.'

Articles 17–20 are specifically about clothing: ‘Wear an Arab head-cloth when with a tribe. Bedu have a malignant prejudice against the hat,' is the opening. ‘Disguise is not advisable,' he goes on to say. ‘Except in special areas, let it be clearly known you are a British officer and a Christian.' But then Lawrence thinks that ‘Arab kit' will help you to ‘acquire their trust and intimacy to a degree impossible in uniform. It is, however, dangerous and difficult.' Allowances are not made, he says, nor breaches of etiquette condoned: ‘You will be like an actor in a foreign theatre, playing a part day and night for months, without rest, and for an anxious stake.' It is perhaps easier to stay in British uniform: ‘Also then the Turks will not hang you, when you are caught.' But, he suggests, if you can pay the psychological price of the change of clothing, the prize of success may be far greater. ‘If you wear Arab things, wear the best,' he states, and ‘If you wear Arab things at all, go the whole way. Leave your English friends and customs on the coast, and fall back on Arab habits entirely.'

And so
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
relates how Lawrence, dressed in the fine white silk wedding robes that later became his emblem, begins to enter the desert Arabs' harder, harsher world. The water gave him dysentery; he endured lice, fleas, ticks, heat. In chapter XXXIII, weak with illness, he was confined to a tent for ten days, dozing and dreaming about the algebra, the biology and the psychology of war. In his smelly, sweaty tent, a theory of guerrilla warfare began to cohere in his mind.