There was a further stretch that night, and at dawn they reached Bir ibn Hassani, the village of Ahmad al-Mansur, one of the great sheikhs of the Harb. As they passed, a camel-rider came loping out of the village and tagged along with them, asking a string of questions, to which Obeyd and his son made short, unwilling, answers. The Arab, whose name was Khallaf, insisted on them eating with him, and forced them to couch their camels. He brought an iron pot out of his saddle-bag, full of baked bread, crumbled and sprinkled with sugar and butter, and offered it to them. Once they had eaten, he told Lawrence that Feisal had been pushed back the previous day from Bir Abbas to Hamra, a little way ahead of them, and he listed the names and injuries of each tribesman who had been hurt. He tried to engage Lawrence in conversation, inquiring if he knew any of the English in Egypt. Lawrence replied in the Aleppo dialect, and Khallaf began asking him about Syrians he knew, then shifted to politics and asked what he thought Feisal’s plans were. Obeyd cut in abruptly and changed the subject, and shortly the man left them. They discovered subsequently that he had been a spy in Turkish pay.
By noon they had come to Wasta, a large village of the Bani Salem, consisting of 1,000 mud houses set on earth mounds and long rocky ridges across the wadi-bed, and above the thick palm groves. Lawrence learned that many of the houses were empty. This year a flood like a tidal wave had broken through the embankment, destroyed many of the palmeries and leached away the carefully preserved topsoil. To cap it all, there had been a terrible plague of locusts which had reduced the harvest still further, driving many of the inhabitants away. They rested in Wasta until early afternoon, then rode up the wadi. Almost at once they began to pass squadrons of Bedu crouching around cooking fires or sitting, smoking in the shade of the trees, and there were caravans laden with provisions on the move. These were Feisal’s men – many of them Bani Salem – who called out greetings to Obeyd as Lawrence’s party passed. Shortly, they saw the village of Hamra before them. They crossed a small stream, and were led up a walled pathway, couching their camels in front of one of the houses. A slave with a scimitar led Lawrence inside, to a smoky room where Feisal was holding court with his military aide,an Iraqi cavalry officer named Maulud al-Mukhlis, and Sheikhs of several Bedu tribes, including the Faqir, the Billi, and the Rwalla – a tribe based in Syria. According to Lawrence, Feisal was already standing at the door when he approached, ‘waiting for him nervously’ – but this is not the Arab way. It is far more likely that when Lawrence entered, the Sharif and his company merely rose to their feet in customary fashion – this was the manner in which they greeted kings and tribesmen alike – while Lawrence shook hands with each of them in turn. He was impressed by the Sharif’s stately appearance, which, he said, reminded him of the monument to Richard the Lionheart – the hero of his youth – at Fontevraud in France. He found Feisal more regal and imposing than his brothers, and this was important: Lawrence’s first reaction to the Arabs had always been aesthetic and the propagandist in him knew that, to appeal to the British, the Arab Revolt should have a leader who at least lookedlike the European idea of the ‘noble Arab’. While ‘Abdallah was too round and jolly, and ‘Ali too sickly and effete, Feisal fitted the bill admirably. For all his noble appearance, though, Lawrence also thought the Sharif looked dog-tired, much older than his thirty-one years, with bloodshot eyes and hollow cheeks, his skin shrivelled with lines of pain. He smoked incessantly. Lawrence claimed in Seven Pillarsthat he had known instinctively that this was ‘the man who would bring the Arab revolt to full glory’, 8yet he told Liddell Hart that in reality he had simply thought that Feisal could be ‘made into a hero of revolt’ more easily than his elder brothers. According to Lawrence, they sat down together among the Bedu, and Feisal asked him: ‘How do you like our place here in the Wadi Safra?’
Lawrence answered: ‘Well; but it is far from Damascus.’
‘The word had fallen like a sword in their midst,’ he wrote. ‘There was a quiver. Then everybody present stiffened where they sat, and held his breath for a silent minute …’It was Feisal, he said, who eased the tension. The Sharif lifted his eyes, smiling, at Lawrence, and said, ‘Praise be to Allah. There are Turks nearer to us than that!’ 9
On the first night, Lawrence and Feisal sat in the smoky room and argued for hours, while the fire crackled and burned down, the dring-drang of the coffee mortar rang out, the coffee and tea went its rounds again and again, and Feisal stubbed out butt after butt. Lawrence found the Sharif most unreasonable. Feisal was indignant that few of the arms he had requested from Wilson had turned up, especially the artillery, and Lawrence became the target of his indignation. Lack of artillery, Feisal maintained, was the Arabs’ main problem: with two field-guns he could have captured Medina. The Bedu were terrified of the very sound of shells, and the merest hint of a barrage sent them scampering for cover like rats. This was not because they were cowards, the Sharif explained – for the Bedu would face bullets and swords steadfastly – but because they could not endure the thought of being blown to bits. Feisal talked about artillery endlessly, and Lawrence perceived that the power of the guns, and the carnage at Medina, had made an ineradicable impression on him. He saw that Feisal’s nerve had been shattered by what he had seen on that day: ‘At [the] original attack on Medina,’ he told Liddell Hart, ‘he had nerved himself to put on a bold front, and the effort had shaken him so that he never courted danger in battle again.’ 10His spirit had been restored by the arrival of the Egyptian battery, but broken again when he saw that the mountain-guns were helpless against the Turkish heavy field-pieces – a shell from the Turkish guns had actually struck his own tent. Privately, Lawrence viewed his regard for artillery as ‘silly’, and felt that, guns or no guns, he had never been near capturing Medina. He also felt that the Sharif had not grasped how to use the Egyptian mountain-guns, whose main advantage was their mobility. He tried to persuade Feisal that irregular soldiers should never try to fight pitched battles, anyway, but should attack in small, self-contained mobile groups. The Turks were dogged defensive fighters, as the British defeat at Gallipoli had demonstrated to their bitter cost, and Lawrence reckoned that a single company of Turks, well-entrenched, could defeat the entire Hashemite army. But the Turks’ strength lay in concentration of numbers, while the strength of the Arabs lay in diffusion: the Bedu, in their tribal wars and forays, had always fought in this way. Feisal disagreed. For weeks now small parties of Bedu had been making lightning strikes on Turkish positions, trying to slow down their advance, and these flea-bites had failed to hold the Turks back: what the Arabs needed was artillery. The Sharif planned to make a massive assault on two of the stations of the Hejaz railway, Buwat and Hafira, just north of Medina, with a 3,000-strong force of Juhayna now stationed at Khayf Hussain. The Turks had concentrated at Bir Darwish, with no less than five battalions of infantry, two Mule Mounted companies, a camel-mounted mountain-gun battery, field-gun batteries, three aircraft and a regiment of ‘Agayl camel-corps. A diversion to the north, Feisal thought, might cause them to retire. Lawrence disliked the plan. He thought that, even with the support of ‘Abdallah to the east, and with Zayd’s force replacing him in the wadi, the Turkish force would only be drawn off by a third, and the remainder might seize the opportunity to push through the Wadi Safra to Rabegh.