Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia

By 8.20 a.m. it was all over. The assault had lasted one hour and twenty minutes, and in that time 19th Brigade had lost over 1,000 men. They had advanced and retreated a little more than half a mile. The Highland Battalion had suffered more than 600 casualties – the 2nd Black Watch, the 1st Seaforth Highlanders, and the 6th Jaht Rifles together now consisted of fewer than 160 men. General Young-husband, commanding the Division, knew that the relief mission to Kut had failed. He could not ask them to advance again. ‘I cannot speak too highly of the splendid gallantry of the Highlanders, aided by a party of the Jahts, in storming the Turkish trenches,’ he wrote. ‘They showed qualities of endurance and courage under circumstances so adverse, as to be almost phenomenal.’ ³⁷

Once again, their valour had been wasted. A week later, white flags fluttered over Kut, and the 13,000 surviving troops of the 6th Indian Division were marched off into a captivity in which more than half of them died. General Townshend, the principal architect of the disaster, abandoned his division and spent an ‘honourable’ captivity in a hotel on the Bosphorus accompanied by his beloved dogs – the only animals which had not been eaten by the starving garrison. Sir Charles had great affection for his dogs, but as to his men, he never once inquired about their welfare. The Turks not only laughed at the British plan to bribe them, but also made political capital from it. Lawrence and Herbert met the Turkish generals for a parley on 29 April, but found that nothing could be salvaged from their plans but the exchange of a few wounded prisoners. The tragedy of Kut had cost the British 38,000 casualties in all, yet not an iota of political advantage had been gained. The British Empire had scarcely been at such a low. There had been slaughter on the Western Front, defeat at Gallipoli, Turkish attacks on the Suez Canal, and now, the dйbвcle at Kut. Lawrence returned to Basra disillusioned, deeply disappointed by his failure to have his strategy adopted, and disgusted with the attitude of the Anglo-Indian generals, still convinced that an Arab movement could have saved the day. All his hopes had been dashed: ‘I did nothing,’ he wrote, ‘of what was in my mind and power to do.’ ³⁸On the ship back to Cairo he drafted a report criticizing them so scathingly that it had to be bowdlerized before being presented to Sir Archibald Murray, who had just replaced Sir John Maxwell as Commander-in-Chief.

Back in Cairo, Lawrence found that Medforce had now been amalgamated with the British Force in Egypt, and that Murray was already planning to use the extra troops in a pre-emptive strike into Sinai. This, at least, he thought, was a move for the better. His approval was not to last for long: Murray turned out to be another orthodox soldier of the old school, who mistrusted intelligence departments and Eastern veterans like Clayton. He divided the now expanded Department, moving many of the officers to his new operational G H Q at Ismailiyya, and leaving only seven – including Lawrence – to make up Cairo Intelligence at the Savoy. Lawrence was glad to see Hogarth, who had arrived in Cairo in March wearing the uniform of a Lieutenant-Commander in the RNVR. At last he had found himself a war job in the Geographical Section of Naval Intelligence, but had been seconded to Egypt where he would help set up the new ‘Arab Bureau’, which was to be knocked together from Clayton’s remnant intelligence officers at the Savoy, but was to answer to the civil authority – High Commissioner McMahon. The Bureau was to be run under the aegis of the Foreign Office, and to be responsible for political developments in the Middle East. In effect, ‘Intrusive’ – as it was codenamed – had been created not only to foment and support insurrection among the Arabs, but also as a tool to spread the gospel of such insurrection into the most exalted circles of British power: ‘We meant to break into the accepted halls of British foreign policy,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘and build a new people in the East.’ ³⁹To begin with, though, Lawrence was not a member of the ‘band of wild men’, as he put it, but retained his old job in Cairo Intelligence. He was, nevertheless, given the task of editing the Bureau’s intelligence summary, the Arab Bulletin. This was work after his own heart, for his excursion to Kut had confirmed him in the belief that he was no man of action. He had made his pilgrimage to the front line, and was now resigned to spending the rest of the war in the office: ‘the most interesting place there is,’ he wrote, ‘until the Near East settles down.’ ⁴⁰There were hopes in the Hejaz, of course, but despite the lengthy negotiations, no one really believed that, when the chips were down, the Sharif would fight. Then, the day before the first issue of the Arab Bulletinwas published, a dramatic development took place. At dawn on 5 June 1916 – the day on which Lord Kitchener was drowned in the North Sea – Sharifs ‘Ali and Feisal raised the scarlet banner of the Hashemites under the walls of Medina, and, in the name of all the Arabs, declared an end to the rule of the Ottoman Turks.

PART TWO

THE WARRIOR

October 1916–October 1918

11. The Biggest Thing in the Near East Since 1550

The Outbreak of the Arab Revolt 1916

It was a harsh land, a thirsty land, a land scorching under a sky of burnished cobalt blue, an inferno of blazing light. It was a place of naked peaks, scarred, cracked and hammered into fantastic forms, a place where dust-devils unreeled across the aching loneliness, a place of deep dry valleys, of saltbush, thornscrub and sedge, of waterless swathes of sand, of crunching black gravel and dark volcanic stones the Bedu called harra. Its name – al-Hejaz – signified ‘The Barrier’, yet for countless generations it had been a highway for pilgrimage and trade. Long before Islam, great caravans had tramped its wastes carrying frankincense from the spice kingdoms of South Arabia to the ports of the Levant. Bilqis, the legendary Queen of Sheba, had passed this way on her journey to King Solomon’s court. No great civilizations had ever flourished here, but scattered through these skeletal, glittering hills and plains were oases of millions of palm-trees – Medina, Yanbu’ an-Nakhl, Tayma, Khaybar, Daydan, Ta’if – like vast green islands in the wastes. At Mecca, a place set in a valley so arid that cultivation was impossible, lay a sacred enclave – a haram– where no beast might be hunted, no tree cut, nor human blood spilt. Since the Time of Ignorance, men had come there to worship before the great black stone of al-Ka’abawhich had fallen from the stars.