He would later comment that Feisal was “almost regal in appearance … Very much like the monument of Richard I at Fontevraud,” which Lawrence had seen during his bicycling tours of French castles and cathedrals. This comparison to the brave but pious king, an inspired leader of men and the supreme warrior of the Middle Ages, who fought his own father and brothers for the throne and who has passed into English history as Richard the Lionheart, was high praise indeed, for he was a figure Lawrence admired greatly. It was also, perhaps, something of a political daydream, for Feisal, courageous and inspiring as he may have been,would have been the last person to take arms against his father and his brothers to become sharif of Mecca himself. (He and his brothers still signed their letters to their father as “Your Slave.”)
Later, in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence would write: “I felt at the glance that now I had found the man whom I had come to Arabia to seek…. He looked very tall and pillar-like, very slender, dressed in long white silk robes and a brown headcloth bound with a brilliant scarlet and gold cord. His eyelids were drooped, and his close black beard and colourless face were like a mask against the strange still watchfulness of his body. His hands were loosely crossed in front of him on his dagger.”
Feisal ushered Lawrence into a small dark room, in which Lawrence, whose eyes were still accustomed to the outside glare, could only just distinguish the presence of a crowd of people seated on the floor. Feisal and Lawrence sat down on the carpet—Lawrence comments that Feisal stared down at his hands, “which were twisting slowly about his dagger,” without drawing our attention to the fact that for Arabs the eye-to-eye stare, which among Britons and Americans signifies an honest man-to-man approach, is instead either a challenge or sheer bad manners by someone who doesn’t know any better—a European, for example.
In a soft voice, speaking Arabic, Feisal asked Lawrence, “And do you like our place here in Wadi Safra?”
To which, after a pause, Lawrence replied, “Well; but it is far from Damascus.”
To quote Lawrence, his words fell “like a sword into their midst,” and all those in the room held their breath for a silent moment. Damascus was their dream—the capital of an Arab state, or nation, that would stretch from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.
Then Feisal smiled, and said, “Praise be to God, there are Turks nearer us than that.”
What Feisal thought of Lawrence was—and would always be—harder to know. The bond between them would grow stronger than either of them could have foreseen that day, but Feisal’s personality was of necessity farmore opaque than Lawrence’s—he was a prince, of a great and proud ruling family trapped between its Arab rivals in the desert (of whom the most dangerous was the future king of Saudi Arabia, ibn Saud*), and its Turkish overlords in Constantinople. Feisal was a politician, a man skilled at hiding his emotions and veiling his thoughts, hardly one to trust a stranger, and certainly not one who would imagine that a British officer might put Arab interests before those of his own country. At their very first meeting, Feisal took in Lawrence’s admiration for his own person, his unusual knowledge of Arab ways, his lack of racial prejudice toward Arabs, and his undisguised enthusiasm for the Arab cause; but Feisal was cautious by nature, not impulsive, except in the heat of battle, and he cannot initially have been sure why this young Englishman had been sent to him. Yet Feisal came quickly to feel affection, trust, and respect for Lawrence, and from the first instant was encouraged by his arrival at Wadi Safra, as might not have been the case had Lawrence been a more conventional British officer. The British were powerful friends and allies, but that is not to say Feisal trusted them completely, any more than he trusted any other European colonial power with ambitions in the Near East—France, for example.
The two men were close in age—Lawrence was twenty-eight, Feisal thirty-three—but Feisal had grown up in a world of cruelty, treachery, and deceit, where the penalty for anti-Turkish activity ranged from exile to torture and public hanging. He had been educated in Constantinople, sat as a member in the Turkish parliament, served as his father’s emissary to the Turkish government, and been a combination of guest and hostage for his father’s good behavior to Ahmed Jemal Pasha, one of the triumvirate that ruled Turkey, as well as the Turkish overlord of Syria and all those parts of the Ottoman Empire in which the Arabs were a majority. (Jemal Pasha was known among Arabs as al-Saffah—the blood shedder, or the butcher.) Feisal had seen his friends and coconspirators, fellow members of Arab secret societies proscribed by the Turks, executed in mass hangings carried out in public by Jemal’s order, and had been obliged to watch them die without shedding a tear or letting his expression betray his emotions.* His was neither a simple nor a transparent character.
Nor, of course, was Lawrence’s; this is perhaps why they got on well from the beginning. Even to somebody as congenitally suspicious as Feisal, it was at once obvious that Lawrence was not a spy in any conventional meaning of the word. He was there to report what he saw, certainly, but his sympathy was already for the Arabs, and his attitude was supportive. A more professional military man might have dwelled on the fact that Feisal’s army had been retreating ever since its humiliating failure to take Medina, which—together with the devastating effects of Turkish artillery, machine guns, and aircraft on poorly armed mounted tribesmen with no experience of the power of modern weapons and high explosives†—had deeply shaken the morale and self-confidence of Feisal’s troops. Lawrence, on the contrary, was sympathetic rather than critical. He understood that supplies were slow to reach Feisal’s army partly because neither Abdulla in Mecca nor Ali in Rabegh had any sense of urgency or any professional supply officers to organize efficiently the flow of flour, ammunition, and gold; and that because Feisal lacked machine guns, mortars, and mountain artillery (which could be broken down into pieces, and carried by camels), he could hardly hope to meet the Turks on equal terms. Had Lawrence himself been a spit-and-polish regular, the state of the Arab army might have dismayed or appalled him, but he was not.
In fact, the only signs of spit and polish in sight were the professionally neat rows of tents of an Egyptian army unit sent from the Sudan by General Wingate to support the Arabs with machine guns and some antiquated short-range light artillery, no match for the Turks’ modern German field guns and howitzers. The Egyptians had been picked because they were Muslims and it was thought that the Arabs would resent their presence less than that of British troops, but in fact the Arabs thought them effete townsmen, over-disciplined by their officers, and too easily upset when Arabs stole from them,* for the Egyptians received ample British army rations. For their part, the Egyptian regulars greatly preferred the Turks to the desert vagabonds, whom they held in contempt. The Egyptians’ esprit de corps was not improved by the fact that the Turks had a reputation for cutting the throat of any wounded left behind by Feisal’s army, without necessarily discriminating between Egyptians and Arabs.