Later that afternoon Lawrence saw Feisal again, and this time they got on much better. If Feisal’s plan to distract them failed, Lawrence thought, the Turks’ next move would probably be to advance on Mecca through Rabegh. In this case the Bedu irregulars could best be used to hold the Subh hills around the Wadi Safra, which formed a natural defensive line. The Turkish army would have no choice but to advance through the wadis, and their twists and turns would be a godsend for guerrilla troops. Even the Turkish artillery would not benefit them much in the hills. He thought that the Arabs should be strengthened with Lewis machine-guns, and some modern field artillery for the sake of their morale, and that they needed technical advisers, better liaison with the British GHQ, and even wireless sets. Though the tribal force would never be capable of an offensive, he thought, it would make a strong defensive screen behind which a regular field-force recruited from slaves, townsfolk and peasants could be built up. Lawrence felt that if Feisal could just hold out in these hills for two months, then al-Masri could train up his column of Arab regulars in Rabegh. As for landing British troops there, Lawrence thought that nothing would be more certain to destroy the Hashemite cause. He noted in his report that Feisal and his aides had no sympathy with the Arab Nationalists hanged in Damascus and Beirut, because they had been in league with the French, hinting strongly to his superiors that the Arabs had no intention of handing their country over to another foreign master, and would thus be highly suspicious of any massed landing of British troops. The intuition was correct, but the facts were almost certainly a fabrication – in Feisal’s case at least, for there are eye-witness reports that he was outraged by the Nationalist hangings when he heard about them in Damascus. In his reports, Lawrence also misrepresented the tribesmen as being intensely nationalistic: in fact they were chauvinistic, xenophobic and fanatically anti-Christian. A British landing would be certain to shatter Hashemite prestige, and drive the tribes into the arms of the Turks. He left at four o’clock in the afternoon of 24 October, with an escort of fourteen tribesmen of the Juhayna, heading for Yanbu’, not expecting to see the Sharif again. He was satisfied that in Feisal the British had a hero they could influence and manipulate, or as he put it, with characteristic ambiguity, a leader ‘with reason to give effect to our science’. He was also confident that he had solved the conundrum of Rabegh: ‘I told my chiefs,’ he wrote, ‘that Mecca was defended not by the obstacle of Rabegh, but by the flank threat of Feisal in [the Subh hills].’ 22
13. Not an Army But a World is Moving upon Wejh
Yanbu’ and Wejh December 1916 – January 1917
It was wishful thinking, of course. The Bedu had never been defensive fighters, and when Fakhri Pasha finally emerged from Medina that December with three full brigades, he outflanked the Bani Salem holding the Wadi Safra and sent them scattering to their villages without a fight. Despite Lawrence’s assurances, they had never received either machine-guns or artillery, and the Turks broke through into the coastal plain within twenty-four hours, proving what Lawrence later dignified as ‘The Second Theorem of Irregular War’ – ‘that irregular troops are as unable to defend a point or line as they are to attack it’. 1Professional soldiers such as Sir Reginald Wingate had been saying this from the beginning without any elaborate ‘theorem’, which was why British troops had been thought necessary to defend Rabegh in the first place. By then, though, it was too late. Lawrence had returned from the mountains like Moses, with the solution to the problem of Rabegh graven in stone. If a British force had landed in the Hejaz, he said later, not a single Arab would have remained with the Sharif. This, as he well knew, was exactly what General Murray wanted to hear, and the provision of machine-guns, artillery and military advisers Lawrence requested seemed to the GOC a small price to pay for the conservation of one or two brigades. Lawrence’s star was suddenly in the ascendant at GHQ, and he realized that he was in a uniquely powerful position. No one had been to the front before him, and none followed him: he was the only British officer who had seen the conditions there for himself. By presenting the evidence, carefully pruned to suit his own objectives, he had now become a major player in the Arab Revolt. His information had also given him a private channel to the other players. On his way back to Cairo, he had not only met Admiral Wemyss, commanding the Red Sea Fleet, who was, like Murray, an opponent of intervention, but had also called at Khartoum to be debriefed by Wingate, who was a staunch supporter of it. That he had managed to convince both parties that each was right was a tribute to his shape-shifting power. After the debriefing, Wingate – who was shortly to move to Cairo as High Commissioner in place of McMahon – wrote: ‘I understood him to agree that in an emergency the Arabs would welcome [a British Brigade] … and cling to this hope of success rather than acquiesce in the certain defeat that failure to hold Rabegh would mean.’ 2Lawrence had not – as far as he was concerned – agreed to any such thing, and Wingate was enraged when later he read Lawrence’s memorandum on the subject. But by then the die was cast, and Clayton managed to convince the Sirdar that Murray had obliged Lawrence to write the document, anyway.