In January 1914, with the new Governor and his eight battalions on the way, Hussain had played his Bedu card swiftly. He mustered the Sheikhs of the tribes and informed them of Vehib’s arrival and his objectives. ‘The railway will ruin you completely,’ he told them. ‘… Once the Turks can rush troops from one part of the Hejaz to the other, they will no longer need to pay gold to the Bedu.’ 12The tribes saw where their interests lay, and gave the Emir their assurance of support. When Vehib arrived he found chaos: the telephone wires had been cut by Bedu tribesmen and the towns were starving; raiders were plundering shops in Jeddah and attacking caravans; his chief of police had disappeared, kidnapped by Bedu tribesmen on the Pilgrim road. The Governor dispatched a desperate message to Istanbul, and for a moment it looked as if the Turks might send a punitive expedition by ship from Smyrna. In the event, though, they backed down and offered ‘Abdallah 250,000 gold sovereigns to persuade his father to end the insurrection, promising in addition half the revenues of the railway once extended to Mecca. ‘Abdallah realized astutely that once the railway had been completed such promises would be as solid as the wind.
Whether he had come to Cairo that February specifically in order to sound out the British attitude to Turkey is uncertain. He had already had in mind the prospect of fomenting a rebellion among Arab units in the Ottoman army in Syria and Mesopotamia and, with British diplomatic help, of securing first the independence of the Hejaz and then, perhaps, of a wider Arab state. It may or may not have been fortuitous that, at an official reception, ‘Abdallah bumped into Lord Kitchener, British Agent, but de factoruler of Egypt, whose concern in the Hejaz was with the safety of Indian pilgrims performing the Haj – the annual pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. At their first meeting it was this subject which they discussed. The following day, though, ‘Abdallah visited Kitchener and inquired tentatively what the attitude of Britain would be if a conflict should develop between the Hashemites and the Turks. Kitchener was circumspect. He himself already considered Turkey a prospective enemy which would threaten the crucial Suez Canal in the event of war: this was, in fact, why he, an Englishman, was the effective power in Egypt – a country still technically a part of the Ottoman Empire. Officially, however, his hands were tied. He explained to ‘Abdallah that Turkey was a friendly country which Britain had fought a war in the Crimea to protect. Britain was thus unlikely to intervene in any conflict between the Hejaz and the Sublime Porte.
In Istanbul, ‘Abdallah’s protests to the Committee of Union and Progress fell on deaf ears, and he returned to Cairo in April 1914 fuming at his reception. By now, however, the Porte’s spies had got wind of his manoeuvres with the British and had dissuaded Kitchener from meeting him. Instead, ‘Abdallah spoke to Ronald Storrs, Oriental Secretary to the British Agency, from whom he requested a consignment of machine guns for ‘defence’ against the Turks. Storrs replied that ‘in principle’ the British Empire’s only interest in the Hejaz was the welfare of its pilgrims and repeated that Britain could not intervene. Secretly, though, Storrs was sympathetic, and by carefully chosen words intimated that Britain’s answer was not in fact so final as it seemed. The two men liked each other: Storrs, the traditional British Orientalist – suave, vain, sophisticated, perhaps bisexual, a lover of fine art and music: ‘Abdallah, the Arabian prince – worldly-wise, cultivated, truculent, highly popular, an incessant quoter of Arabic verse and lover of young boys. It was perhaps as these two highly intelligent representatives of their nations faced each other in the Abdin Palace that, in scarcely perceptible signs, hints and attitudes, the Arab Revolt was born.
It was not until that autumn, when Turkey’s entry to the war seemed inevitable, that Kitchener was able to come out into the open. On 24 September he sent a cable from London, instructing Storrs to dispatch a secret and highly trustworthy messenger to ‘Abdallah in the Hejaz to find out whether the Hashemites would be with or against the British in the event of war. Storrs commissioned a veteran Persian agent named ‘Ali Asghar – known to posterity as ‘Messenger X’ – to go to Mecca disguised as a pilgrim. ‘Ali left Suez on 5 October, reached Jeddah three days later, hired a donkey for Ј 2and, having ridden all night, arrived in the Holy City the following morning. After several days’ wait, he managed to contact ‘Abdallah. He arrived back in Cairo before the end of the month, with a message conveying a response Kitchener had not anticipated. He would have been happy had the Arabs merely agreed to stay out of the war. Instead, to his surprise, ‘Abdallah promised to remain neutral for the time being, but, with sufficient diplomatic support, ‘to lead his immediate followers into armed revolt’. 13The text was cabled to London on 29 October: the Ottoman Empire declared war formally on Britain two days later. By early December, Lawrence, Woolley and Newcombe had been posted to Cairo’s General Staff.
10. Cairo is Unutterable Things
Cairo and Mesopotamia 1914–16
When the black and white taxi deposited me in Ezbekiyya Square, Cairo, I had some difficulty at first in spotting the Grand Continental Hotel. I suddenly realized that it was the dismal, mouldering heap opposite the Ezbekiyya Gardens, half hidden by a row of very drab shops. In the Bodleian Library in Oxford, I had seen a picture of the place as it had been in 1914, embossed on the head of a letter written by T. E. Lawrence, and it was difficult to equate this mildewed tenement before me with that great colonial chвteau whose guest-list – A. & C. Black’s guidebook for 1916 had assured me – once read like a page out of the Almanac de Gotha.That grand world of Egypt’s belle й poque,when Cairo had been a fashionable winter resort rivalling Nice and Monte Carlo, was lost, hidden like the hotel itself beneath the seedy faзade of a hectic modern city. In the dark lobby, a fly-blown man with a two-day stubble showed brown teeth when I pressed him for the price of a room: ‘This place hasn’t been a hotel in ten years,’ he said. In what had been the Front Desk Manager’s office – a place of peeling paint and faded velvet upholstery – a wizened man called Khalid groped in some filing cabinets and brought out a colour postcard of the hotel as it had looked ten years previously: precisely as neglected as it looked now, I thought. ‘They said it was beyond repair,’ he told me. ‘They couldn’t use it as a hotel any more, so they turned it into offices.’ There was no chance of me seeing the rooms upstairs, he said, but he would show me the downstairs area, and, fetching a great ring of keys, he led me like a gaoler across the lobby and unlocked a steel flange nailed across the dining-room doors. The room was astonishingly vast, with a plush carpet, once wine-red, perhaps, but now faded and rotten and covered in rat-droppings and bits of plaster fallen from the ceiling. ‘I was a bellboy here in the old days,’ Khalid said. ‘Kings and Princes used to come from all over the world. It was the best hotel in Egypt.’ He showed me the fine frescos of ancient Egyptian gods and Pharaohs which adorned the walls. ‘Italian artist,’ he said. ‘Done more than a hundred years ago.’ Lawrence must have known them well, I thought, for the Grand Continental had been his base for nine months from 1914 to 1915, and he had taken breakfast, lunch and dinner in this room almost every day. In the lobby, you could see the remains of a travel-agent’s kiosk, a worn-out sign announcing Nile cruises, and a jeweller’s shop, and Khalid showed me what had been the bar – though all that was left were the mirror-mosaic shelves where the bottles would have been on display. ‘Here they had whisky,’ he said, and I imagined the great and good of Cairo in 1914 – Ronald Storrs, Bertie Clayton, George Lloyd, Aubrey Herbert, Stewart Newcombe and others – nursing their drinks and turning over in their eminently civilized heads their dreams of Empire, their dreams of the Arab Revolt.