12. Fallen Like a Sword into Their Midst
First Mission to the Hejaz October 1916
In 1916 Jeddah was a tiny walled port, only half a mile square. Today it is a thriving metropolis, covering an area several hundred times larger, served by two international airports, and almost drowned under a continually rolling stream of motor cars. I flew there in high summer and when I arrived the wetness in the air clung to me like a sweater. I was pleased, though, to find that odd bits of the old port survived. The lagoon, still stinking of sulphur, was no longer used as a harbour, but along the wharfs there were the fractured hulls of sambuks,and the old sea-gate, by which Lawrence had entered the town, had been restored as a monument to the past. Among the air-conditioned shopping malls and the marble walkways, I came across examples of the baroque coral-and-limestone skyscraper houses Lawrence had described in Seven Pillars.Some were on a modest scale, listing dangerously from exhaustion into the narrow alleys of the suq, while others were vast and palatial, with heavy doors of carved teak, rambling faзades of timbered bow windows, tiers of ornate latticework, mock balconies and balustrades, mashrubatslats like huge light-filters, great edifices of shutters and crosspoles, curving around the entire front of the building. In the pedestrian precinct of the Old Town, I drifted along in the sauna-heat, blessedly far from the noise of cars, amid the smells of cinnamon, coffee and sherbet, among men in scarlet Mosul headcloths, and women flitting like faceless shadows in black, and tried to imagine for an instant that I had stepped back in time. In 1916, of course, these alleys would have been dark, earth-floored conduits, shaded with sacking through which the light strobed in golden shafts, obstructed by donkeys and laden camels, and – during the Pilgrim season – crowded with shaven-pated men of almost every conceivable race – Turks, Baluch, Indians, Pharsees, Malays, Javanese, Africans from Zanzibar and the Sudan. That October, though, Lawrence had found Jeddah almost deserted: ‘hushed, strained, furtive’ he wrote – a ghost town, where doors shut silently as he approached. Dodging traffic, I followed his route from the stinking wharfs, and came upon the house that had once been the British Agency – a squarish block with well-carved lattice-windows, shining brilliantly with white paint, but sadly devoid of the rambling asymmetry which had made some of the old houses in the suq attractive. It had been restored overzealously as the Municipal Museum, and stood on a triangular island in the harbour ring-road, opposite a vast glass-fronted shopping mall and dwarfed by the towering concrete-and-glass blade of the National Commercial Bank.
Lawrence and Storrs had arrived at this building at 9.30 on the morning of 16 October 1916, to find Cyril Wilson seated in a darkened room behind an open lattice. He had welcomed them politely but without much enthusiasm. He was essentially an honest, honourable and forthright man, who thought Storrs effete and devious, and Lawrence, whom he had once met in Cairo, a know-it-all and ‘a bumptious young ass’. He knew that they did not share his opinion that a British force should be landed at Rabegh, and was embarrassed that his promises to Feisal had not been fulfilled. He had arranged a meeting with ‘Abdallah, who, fresh from his victory at Ta’if, had pitched his tents near Eve’s Tomb, four miles outside the town. That morning, Wilson and Storrs rode out to meet the Sharif, and in the afternoon ‘Abdallah returned the compliment, riding through the Mecca gate on a white mare with an escort of slaves. Stylishly turned out in a yellow silk headcloth, a camel’s-hair cloak, a white silk shirt and knee-length boots of patent leather, he dismounted at the Agency and was shown into a meeting consisting of Storrs, Wilson, Lawrence, and two Arab officers – Aziz ‘Ali al-Misri, the Hashemite Chief of Staff, who had travelled down in the Lamawith Storrs – and Lawrence, and Sayyid ‘Ali Pasha, the Egyptian general commanding the artillery with Feisal in the hills. After describing conditions in the Hejaz, ‘Abdallah revealed his concern about the danger to Rabegh. A Turkish advance now might take away all the Arabs’ hard-won victories: the urban population was not undivided in its support for the Hashemites, and even among the Bedu there were elements of the Harb, the Billi – and some of the Juhayna – who were not entirely to be trusted, and who might easily go over to the enemy. He asked anxiously about the possibility of landing the British force, which had more than once been promised. This was the moment Storrs had secretly been dreading. In a conference at Ismaeliyya on 12 September, which both he and Wilson had attended, Sir Archibald Murray, the G O C, had savaged the idea of sending British soldiers. Murray needed his troops for the serious business of protecting the Suez Canal, and was wary of ‘sideshows’ which, like the Gallipoli campaign, could quickly escalate out of all proportion and swallow men and arms needed elsewhere. Murray was also of the opinion that the Hashemites had botched the revolt: ‘The Sharif, as might have been expected, has muddled the business,’ he wired to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Robertson, in London; ‘it is not unlikely that, in spite of the numbers against them, the Turks will suppress the rising… I do not think we should send British troops… if we begin by sending a Brigade of infantry the demands will never cease – we shall begin with infantry, then artillery, then engineers … followed by …the whole impedimenta of a campaign in the desert …’ 1Wilson and Parker were pushing hard for a British landing, and Murray had an orthodox soldier’s instinctive dislike for such ‘experts’: ‘I have little faith in the judgement on a military question of any officer who has spent the best part of his life in this country [i.e. Egypt],’ he wrote. ‘Men like Wilson and Parker, now with the Sharif, are good Arabic scholars and know the habits and customs of the country, but their recommendations as to the military action are often futile and impossible of solution.’ 2Murray had firmly rejected their recommendations, and in London Robertson had supported his decision. It was Storrs’s embarrassing task to explain to ‘Abdallah that not only would the promised troops not be sent after all, but that the Ј10,000 granted was to be withheld, and the flight of aircraft which had already been dispatched to Rabegh to be withdrawn. ‘Abdallah, Storrs knew, would view this as tantamount to treachery. Though Storrs was relieved that he ‘took it like a fine gentleman’, he wrote in his diary: ‘The moment when we had to explain that the withdrawal of our promise of the Brigade included the aeroplanes was not pleasant and I do not wish to have to show H M Government to an Arab a second time in that light.’ 3In fact, ‘Abdallah was astonished and angry, and after the meeting went straight to the French Agency to talk to Lieutenant-Colonel Bremond, who had just arrived to take charge of a tiny French military mission. ‘Abdallah hinted to Bremond that because the British had refused to help, the Hashemites might be forced to sue for peace with the Turks. Bremond felt that if the Arabs withdrew from the conflict, then, in the event of victory, the British alone would claim the lands of the Near East. The French could not spare large numbers of troops from the Western Front, and only his small contingent in Jeddah would ensure a place at the Peace Conference afterwards. If that mission had to retire, then all French hopes in Syria might be dashed. Bremond later hurried round to Wilson with the news, and after a flurry of cables, the British agreed to reconsider the question.