Gertrude Bell (56 page)

Gertrude's and Faisal's lives were drawing closer. While he was risking his life on the secret mission in Damascus, she was visiting Charles Hardinge in India with a secret agenda—to deflect his opposition to the proposed Arab revolt. In January 1916, when a second group of Arab nationalists were being condemned, Jemal Pasha noted that Faisal “moved heaven and earth” to save them, and remonstrated with men who would not speak in their favour. Those were the only times that Faisal let his feelings show. One false step, he knew, would have meant the end of the mission for Arab independence. Hussain now told him that all was ready for the rebellion, but Faisal believed the time was not yet ripe. His father, obstinate and controlling as always, told him to come to Medina immediately and join the troops he had amassed there.

Faisal was reluctant, but obedient. He asked leave of his Turkish superiors to inspect the troops in Medina, ostensibly as a preliminary to their advance to the Turkish front. To his despair, Jemal Pasha announced that he and Enver Pasha, the Young Turks' acting commander-in-chief, would accompany him in the review of the troops.

The charade began. Faisal, constrained by the immutable laws of Arab hospitality, had to restrain his troops from shooting the two Turks forthwith, all the while reassuring them that the troops were indeed volunteers for the Holy War against the enemies of the Faithful. In his memoirs, Jemal was to say that, had he known all the facts, he would have taken Faisal prisoner then and there, seized Sharif Hussain and his other sons, and nipped the rebellion in the bud.

On 2 June 1916, Sharif Hussain stood on a balcony of his Meccan palace, a rifle to his shoulder, and fired the shot that began the Arab Revolt. While Abdullah and Zaid, a younger brother, were sent to drive the Turks from Taif, Jidda, and Mecca, Faisal and Ali were set an incomparably more difficult project: to pit their few thousand ill-equipped troops against the twenty-two-thousand-strong Turkish garrison of Medina. Having learnt the strength of the garrison with its heavy battery of artillery, they withdrew to the desert and set about raising a larger force of Bedouin.

Medina would never be taken, but by a later strategy would be successfully isolated from the rest of the Turkish army. Meanwhile Amir Faisal emerged from the episode having gained the love of his men, who called him “Saidna Faisqal” or “our Lord Faisal,” and won their admiration for his courage. When his tribesmen, unused to heavy bombardment, were reluctant to follow him across an open stretch of land while being raked by gunfire from the walls of Medina, Faisal laughed at them, then walked his horse slowly across the valley of death, never once quickening his pace. From the far side, he beckoned his men to follow. Whooping and waving their rifles over their heads, they galloped over the divide.

Turkish revenge was quick and devastating. They surrounded the Arab citizens of the nearby town of Awali and, as Lawrence reported, massacred “every living thing within its walls. Hundreds of the inhabitants were raped and butchered, the houses fired, and living and dead alike thrown back into the flames.” The shock waves reverberated across Arabia, fanned the tribes' hatred of the Turks, and strengthened their resolve. “The first rule of Arab war was that women were inviolable,” wrote Lawrence, “the second that the lives and honour of children too young to fight with men were to be spared: the third, that property impossible to carry off should be left undamaged.” While the Turks would slit the throats of their prisoners, Faisal would pay a pound a head for his enemies to be captured alive.

In the autumn of 1916, as Gertrude was entertaining Ibn Saud at Basra, Lawrence was travelling with the egregious Ronald Storrs from Suez to Jidda, where Storrs, as Oriental Secretary to the Cairo government, was to meet Abdullah to discuss the early failure of the revolt. The issue was
whether the British Egyptian army should invade Rabegh on the coast, in order to protect nearby Mecca from the Turks. By exercising his gifts of persuasion, Storrs won permission from Hussain for Lawrence to travel into the desert to meet Faisal.

Lawrence describes Faisal as still and watchful, with lowered eyelids giving him a shuttered look. Tall and thin in his white silk robes, he wore a brown keffiyeh bound with a brilliant red and gold cord, and his fine hands were crossed on the hilt of his scimitar. He was surrounded by many sheikhs, standing silently in the shadows of the room behind him. They sat down on the carpet in an unfriendly silence. Faisal then asked very quietly, without looking up, how Lawrence had found the journey—“and do you like our place here in Wadi Safra?” Lawrence responded, “Well; but it is far from Damascus.” A shock wave ran around the room, and Faisal lifted his eyes to his visitor for the first time. He looked directly at Lawrence and smiled his slow, sweet smile: “Praise be to God, there are Turks nearer us than that.”

In a famous passage from
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, Lawrence wrote:

I had believed these misfortunes of the Revolt to be due . . . to the lack of leadership, Arab and English. So I went down to Arabia to see and consider its great men. The first, the Sherif of Mecca, we knew to be aged. I found Abdulla too clever, Ali too clean, Zeid too cool. Then I rode up-country to Feisal, and found in him the leader with the necessary fire . . . 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.

Faisal was indeed a born leader. Though at the time glory was a long way off, his patient leadership and charismatic personality dominated the Bedouin tribes who flocked to his standard. From his tent he performed the endless duties that combined to weld together the rival tribes, Billi and Juheina, Ateiba and Agail. He persuaded them to suspend all their blood feuds and paved the way for his army to pass unmolested across the desert, where inter-tribal robbing, looting, and killing were the norm. His father, Hussain, had sent them orders, but little food or money, and British aid had turned out to be a bitter joke: a few men from the Sudan and four Krupp guns almost too old to be used. Faisal had to travel with
a locked chest full of stones to convince his men that he had the gold with which to pay them.

Lawrence departed, promising stores and supplies, officer-volunteers, and as many mountain guns and light machine-guns as he could raise. The British would land them at Yenbo, the nearest Red Sea port to Medina, and Yenbo would be Faisal's next base. Lawrence hitched a lift from Admiral Wemyss, staunch supporter of the Arab cause, from Jidda to Port Sudan, then travelled on to make contact with Sir Reginald Wingate, Sirdar of the Egyptian army, in command of the British military side of the Arab adventure. He too was a supporter of the Revolt, as was General Clayton, now the civil head of the Arab Bureau, Lawrence's second port of call.

The fighting against the Turks had reached stalemate, and at any minute the Turkish garrison at Medina might move south against Mecca, striking a decisive victory and causing reverberations throughout Islam. The British lacked confidence in their plan to land a conventional army at Rabegh, and hold a line between Medina and Mecca. Lawrence had a solution: guerrilla warfare waged by small groups of Arab fighters backed by British expertise and explosives. The plan, though chancy at best and proposed by an archaeologist with no military training, came as a blessed relief after months of indecision. It was worth a try.

In a search for his own personal odyssey, and very much under Faisal's spell, a vehement Lawrence fulfilled his promise to get things moving at the British end. In due course British technical advisers arrived at Yenbo, with money and arms—Lawrence had stressed that the tribesmen preferred guns that made a lot of noise. He deflected the interference of Colonel Bremond, the head of the French military mission at Jidda, and then was ordered back by Clayton to Faisal's side. Lawrence always maintained that he returned to Yenbo and to the Amir with reluctance, that all he wanted was to get back to map-making in Cairo. Reluctance is an emotion hard to associate with his subsequent legendary role. As much as he craved admiration and fame, he yearned even more to give the impression of a man averse to these very things—like his hero Charles Doughty, author of
Arabia Deserta
, whose heart and soul were vested in another world.

Lawrence found Faisal in the wadi behind Yenbo, the valley filled with a wild confusion of Arabs and camels. It was night, and he describes
the Amir sitting serenely on a carpet spread out on the stones, dictating to a kneeling secretary who was writing by the light of a lamp held aloft by a slave. The Harb tribe had been routed by the Turks, who had sent Faisal's brother Zaid, their leader, into rapid retreat. Faisal had moved down to cut off the road from Yenbo, where one Captain Boyle was defending the harbour with his ships' guns against any Turkish approach. Faisal finished his letters, addressed to the paramount sheikhs of the tribal territories ahead, bargaining for protection for his army as they passed through and asking for contributions of troops. Then he sat patiently on in the cold of night, settling the private petitions of his tribesmen until 4 a.m. It was said that Faisal's judgements never left a single Arab dissatisfied or disadvantaged. Then the Amir ate half a dozen dates and lay down on the dew-wetted carpet to sleep. As he slept, noted the watchful Lawrence, his guards crept up and quietly spread their cloaks over him. One hour later, he was awake for the call to prayer.

In his constant daily work of settling feuds and other tribal matters, Faisal was, said Lawrence,

putting together and arranging in their natural order the innumerable tiny pieces which make up Arabian society and combining them against the Turks . . . he was Court of Appeal, ultimate and unchallenged, for western Arabia. He made the Arab [Independence] Movement national and alive by the force of his personality. When the Sheikhs came to him to assert their allegiance, he made them swear on the Koran to “wait while he waited, march when he marched, to yield obedience to no Turk, to deal kindly with all who spoke Arabic and to put independence above life, family and goods.”

Lawrence was also deeply involved in persuading the tribes to unite against the Turks, and it was Gertrude's advice and knowledge of desert affiliations that guided him. He admitted that he owed to her much of the information that had helped him to rally the tribes in the desert at a critical moment during the Arab Revolt.

Gertrude had last seen Lawrence in April 1916, on his abortive mission to the besieged Kut, when they discussed at length “the government of the universe.” Now, in Basra, she followed events as best she could and yearned for action. Lawrence, writing letters only to his family, otherwise
confined his correspondence to detailed reports and requests for equipment. He was living with Faisal in his tent in Yenbo—an ordinary bell tent, with a camp bed, a couple of rugs, and a beautiful prayer carpet. It was here that Faisal first invited Lawrence to wear Arab clothing, in order to prevent any of his eight thousand tribesmen mistaking him, in his khaki uniform, for a Turkish officer. Lawrence was not slow to accept.

British aid dribbled into Yenbo: four British planes and twenty-three obsolete and extremely noisy guns. Lawrence had a landing strip cleared, and light advance parties were being trained in the use of explosives and the art of dynamiting the Meissner-built Hejaz railway. The technical expert, one Garland, was a physicist who had developed his own devices for cutting metal and toppling telegraph poles. Lawrence was an eager student, and soon devised his own method of direct firing by the use of electricity.

The plan was to move up the coast and capture the Turkish garrison of Wejh, an important town on the Red Sea coast between Yenbo and Aqaba. At the same time, Ali, Abdullah, and Zaid would move up inland, concentrating their forces on the railway to Medina, and dynamite the line in several places. The Turks would then be isolated by both sea and land, and deprived of all supplies necessary for attacking Mecca.

On 18 January 1917, Faisal moved off at the head of ten thousand troops on the three-week journey to Wejh, in what would be the defining moment of the Arab Revolt. Operations were no longer confined to the southern Hejaz: the tribes of western Arabia were united for the first time against a common enemy. The beginning of the march that would carry the Amir to Damascus, it was to make of Faisal, and Lawrence, international figures. Faisal's success would also incur his father's lasting jealousy, matched only by that of his brother Abdullah.

Faisal, dressed in white, rode up to the front of the army, cheerfully greeting each sheikh while they, standing in a line by their kneeling camels, made the low bow and sweep of the arm to the lips which was the official salute. As he led off, they fell in behind him, swelling the ranks tribe by tribe until they filled the landscape for a quarter of a mile. Drums beat and poets improvised stanzas as they rode, punctuating the roar of the ten thousand voices raised in warsong. Behind Faisal came the purple banners borne on gold spikes, and the “wild bouncing mass” of his twelve hundred bodyguards mounted on camels caparisoned in
crimson and gold. Behind them marched some five thousand camelry and 5,300 men on foot, with the Krupp mountain guns and machine-guns, and behind them again, 380 camels carrying tents and other essentials.

When Faisal and his army arrived, they found that Wejh had already been captured by the Royal Navy. But by proceeding to blow up bridges and destroy trains and railtracks, the Arabs confounded the Turks despite their vastly superior numbers, and captured the attention of the world.

Lawrence left Wejh in company with Sharif Nasir of Medina and Auda Abu Tayyi of the eastern Howeitat, in an epic detour through the desert to Aqaba. Faisal had approved the venture: Lawrence had £22,000 from the Amir's private purse in his saddle-bag. With a camel corps provided by Abu Tayyi, the party reached Aqaba in July, took the garrison and marched into the town with six hundred Turkish prisoners in tow. Surprise had been on the side of the Arabs. No one had expected an attack on Aqaba from the desert. Its huge guns were fixed in the other direction, to repel attack by sea. The victory registered, once and for all, the importance to the British of the Arabs as allies: with Lawrence they had borne the brunt of the fighting in the south and taken the Red Sea, which would allow the Egyptian army to head for Damascus. General Allenby, newly in charge of the British army, now appointed Faisal commander-in-chief of all Arab operations north of Ma'an, and authorized money, munitions, and transport along their route to Damascus.