Текст книги "Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia"
Автор книги: Michael Asher
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By the time Lawrence arrived in Mesopotamia, more than 20,000 men had already been killed or injured in vain attempts to relieve the garrison. The British could not go on indefinitely feeding their soldiers into the furnace – they simply did not have the men. The question, then, was how to save Kut without wasting the lives of thousands more. To the British military hierarchy, any strategy other than the sledgehammer frontal attack seemed inconceivable. They had failed even to encircle the Turkish units investing the town, leaving open their lines of communication and supply. The solution to the problem of Kut required an obliqueness of thought of which the generals were incapable. It required a subtle and ingenious mind, unhampered by the conventions of the hereditary British warrior-class. It required such a mind as T. E, Lawrence possessed.
Despite his lack of war experience, Lawrence was confident of his ability to solve the problem. His superiors must have had confidence in him too. He had been sent to Basra with a letter of introduction from High Commissioner McMahon, stating that he was under orders from the War Office to lend his services in regard to Arab matters. ‘He is one of the best of our very able intelligence staff here,’ the letter ran, ‘and has a thorough knowledge of the Arab question in all its bearings.’ 31If the Arab tribes of the Hai and the Euphrates could be raised in revolt, Lawrence believed, then the garrison at Kut could be saved without the wholesale butchery which had marked its progress so far. Should this fail, though, Lawrence and Aubrey Herbert – who had been brought back especially for the assignment – were authorized to offer a selected Turkish general a bribe of Ј1 million (later increased to Ј2 million) to let Townshend’s division go.
Lawrence disembarked at Basra, where he ran into several old friends from his Carchemish days, including Gertrude Bell and Campbell-Thompson – who were both serving in the Basra Intelligence Department under Sir Percy Cox – and Hubert Young, the Arabic-speaking officer who had helped him mould gargoyles for the roof of the Expedition House in 1913. Young, who had liked Lawrence on their first meeting, was on this occasion utterly disappointed in him: ‘He seemed to me thoroughly spoilt,’ Young wrote, ‘and posing in a way that was quite unlike what I remembered… It was then that I first noticed his anti-regular soldier complex and … resented it hotly.’ 32If Young’s resentment is understandable, so is Lawrence’s: on the Western Front, at Gallipoli and now in Mesopotamia, regular soldiers had already squandered thousands of innocent lives – those of his brothers among them. Lawrence began to scour Basra for Arab contacts. He had been hoping to meet Sayid Taleb of the Pan-Arab party, but found he was out of the country. On 7 April he met Sulayman Fayzi, a Basra notable and former associate of Sayid Taleb, who had been a member of the Ottoman Parliament. Fayzi recalled that Lawrence had begun by saying that he liked the Arabs and wished them success. Britain was intent on giving them independence, he continued, but could do so only if the Arabs revolted against the Turks. ‘The British have authorised me to initiate this revolt,’ Lawrence told him, ‘and to offer what it may need in money and arms… I have selected you to perform the task of sparking the fire of the revolt.’ 33Fayzi replied that he could not raise a revolt since he was not a tribal chief. ‘With money you could do wonders,’ Lawrence told him. ‘You could pitch a great many tents, employ many guards and attendants, offer hospitality to all who visit you and grant valuable gifts to supporters. With all this you could become a great leader and would soon find yourself at the head of a great army.’ 34Fayzi said that he would consult with his friends – remnants of the Pan-Arab party’s committee – but came back later saying that they had rejected the proposal. Lawrence had been hoping to take some of them with him to the front before revealing the full details of his plan, but in the event he was forced to go off alone.
He left Basra on a paddle-steamer with an infantry detachment on 9 April and steamed up the Tigris, a viscous brown stream, stitched in a baroque pattern of switch-back channels and sandbreaks across a brooding, dead world of black and grey flint. On the first night the ship moored at Qurna – the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates, and the putative site of the Garden of Eden. Staring into the brown waters as they swirled and mingled, Lawrence thought with nostalgia of his friends at Carchemish, and wondered if he would ever see Dahoum again. Although he did not know it then, Dahoum was almost certainly dead – killed by the terrible famine and epidemics of 1916 which the war had exacerbated. Carchemish had been his own private Garden of Eden: ‘till the war swallowed up everything,’ he wrote later, ‘I wanted nothing better than Carchemish, which was a perfect life.’ 35It might have been a requiem for an entire generation, for the holocaust in which he and his peers found themselves was a nodal point in world history – the point beyond which the traditions and assumptions which had governed European life for centuries would ultimately be swept away.
He arrived at Wadi – where Tigris Force had made its H Q – six days later, to be given short shrift from the senior members of staff. The relief campaign was faring badly, yet the generals intended to send in still more waves of troops. That his countrymen were being sacrificed like beasts on the altar of their leaders’ ambition distressed Lawrence as abjectly as it was to distress the war’s most celebrated poet, Wilfred Owen:
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
– Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons. 36
The Anglo-Indian generals did not wish to consider Lawrence’s ideas. Such unorthodox strategy, they said, was incompatible with the ideal of ‘military honour’ – that same ‘honour’ which had already cost thousands of lives without gaining them a single inch of ground. For them, any kind of secret or subversive activity in war was tantamount to ‘cheating’. It was precisely the same emotion which in earlier times had caused British officers to order their redcoats to fight in the open, since it was ‘cowardly’ to hide behind trees. But it was not only a matter of this misplaced conception of honour. The Anglo-Indian mandarins were horrified at the idea of an Arab Revolt. They felt that it would provide a dangerous example to India’s millions of Muslim subjects, the possibility of whose insurrection gave them sleepless nights. The generals would have their frontal offensive. Lawrence was struck down by fever at the critical moment, and could do little but thrash helplessly on his bunk.
At first light on 22 April, he was woken up by a shocking barrage of shellfire from the British guns. For forty minutes the cannon boomed with slow, deliberate percussion, then suddenly the rhythm increased to a crescendo – the prelude to an attack. The Turks were holding five lines of trenches at a place called Sannaiyat, in a narrow bottle-neck between a treacherous salt-marsh and the riverbank. It was an almost impregnable position, but in order to reach Kut, Tigris Corps had no alternative but to punch a way through. At point of the spearhead – 19th Brigade – were the Highlanders: the bloodied remnants of the 2nd Black Watch and the 1st Seaforths, so decimated from previous assaults that they had been hastily cobbled together into a single battalion for this fight. At 7 a.m. precisely, 19th Brigade moved out. Turkish machine-guns and artillery blazed at them from positions concealed by the dappling heat-haze, and the Highlanders rushed straight into the rattling maw of the guns. It had been estimated that it would take them seven minutes to broach the Turkish line. It took them four. As the men came into the range of their own artillery they waved their red markers frantically for the bombardment to stop. Then they drove themselves on through the waterlogged ditches, only to find their rifles so clogged with mud that they could not be fired. Moments later, the Turks swept in from the flanks with a massive counter-attack, and 19th Brigade was swamped. The position looked hopeless. One by one the spearhead battalions withdrew, leaving only the Highlanders – who ignored the order to retreat. Incredibly, they tried to continue the advance, making three separate assaults on the third line defences. From these three attacks, not a single man returned.
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.
Between such oases, the wilderness was trawled by the desert and hill folk – the Bedu – a people in endless movement, endlessly changing, endlessly adapting to the whims of the land: now staying in one place long enough to plant seeds, now furling their black tents and setting their camels’ heads towards some distant pasture. The changes came slowly, generation by generation, and the Bedu, who had virtually no history, could not remember that things had ever been different, and believed their ways immutable and hallowed by time. Their records, enshrined in verse and handed down from mouth to mouth, were endless tales of war upon war, or clan against clan and tribe against tribe, of interminable raids and skirmishes. Such wars were fought with ‘white weapons’ – the swordblade and the spear. Fighting with these arms, a man could scarcely be slain without his killer being known to the entire world. Vengeance would be certain. It was the absolute law of lex talionis– an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth – that prevailed, and the Bedu had a saying which underlined the slow inevitability of the vendetta: ‘Forty years on, the Bedui took his revenge.’ By Bedu tradition, vengeance might fall on any adult male relative of the killer within five generations – which was as far back as anyone could recall his own true ancestry. Beyond one’s great-great-great grandfather, genealogy passed into the nebula of myth. The tribe itself was something of an abstract entity, consisting of a number of five-generation families who simply felt they belonged together while not necessarily being related by blood. Yet this tribe was the refuge and sanctuary of every individual. Though the tribes were violently independent and quite often in a state of hostility with one another, within them there was a feeling of passionate unity and solidarity known as ‘ asabiyya,and in it lay the true strength of Arabia. Individuals owed no personal allegiance to any other: they owed their loyalty eternally to the tribe.
In the Hejaz, the Bedu lived on the milk of their she-camels, on dates and grain from their own oasis gardens, for here there was no transition from the desert to the sown. The great tribes of western Arabia – the ‘Utayba, the Harb, the Juhayna, the Billi, the Muttar and the Bani ‘Atiya – consisted of families who lived in a continuum of lifestyles, from fully nomadic, to semi-nomadic, to villagers who scarcely moved at all. Yet while the more mobile tended to sneer at the more settled, they were kinsmen, and all were considered honourable, and derived honour from the reputation of the tribe. For though the individual members of a tribe were equals, and the Sheikhs simply primes inter pares, the tribes themselves were not. The tribes which were most powerful at any given moment were considered the most ‘noble’, and altered their genealogies accordingly. There were certain outcast tribes, such as the Shararat, the ‘Awazim and the Hutaym, who were not accepted as warriors, and with whom no one would marry, and an anomalous folk called the Solayb, who were tinkers, hunters and medicine-men. Another group, the ‘Agayl, fitted none of these categories. Mostly settled villagers from the Qasim oases of Najd, the ‘Agayl were not a tribe but a brotherhood of camel-dealers and caravan guides known everywhere in Arabia as honest brokers and superb camel-handlers, and a force of mercenaries respected as brave fighters, who would remain loyal to those they had undertaken to protect. Though the ‘Agayl were not Bedu, they were considered honourable in every part of the land. Bedu life was hard, but the idea that it was a ‘death in life’, as Lawrence later claimed, shows more about his own character than the nature of the Bedu. In fact, their culture was so perfectly adapted to the desert that they felt at home there. Their herds of camels, goats and sheep were their survival machines: much that they used could be garnered from their own materials – the rest they could trade for in the towns. They lived not by material wealth – a transient thing in such desolation – but by the cult of reputation. A man gained honour by displaying courage, endurance, hospitality, generosity and loyalty, and while no strange caravan, nor traveller, nor rival tent was free from his depredations, there was no more honourable travelling companion nor host once he had shared bread and salt. Raiding for camels was the spice of his life, and a means of acquiring reputation, and his hand was turned against every man, unless it suited him. His services could be bought with gold, but his soul could not.
The hardest facet of Bedu life for a stranger to grasp was not its physical aspect, but its spiritual one. The Bedu lived in a different space-time continuum from the European – a world which was flat, a world in which the sun crossed the sky, a world in which the stars were merely lights in the heavens, a world which could not be measured by kilometres or miles. They inhabited a world in which everything – every tree, stone or pool – had its individual spirit, but in which everything was related in God: in which a man must accept what befell him because it was the will of God. The Bedu had no lust to explain, no thought to solve, no notion to improve – the answer to every question lay not in reason but in faith. They lived in a world without physical security, where death – from raiders, thirst, hunger, accident or disease – might strike at any moment. Yet they possessed existential security – like the medieval European, they had an absolute knowledge of who they were, a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning, a sense that God moved everything for the best, a sense of belonging to the earth and to the universe, which modern Europeans had lost.
Johan Lutwig Burckhardt and Richard Burton had penetrated Mecca and Medina disguised as Muslims in the first half of the nineteenth century, and Charles Doughty had travelled in forma pauperisin Arabia in the 1870s. Yet of the land itself, little was known to the outside world: ‘Up to 1914,’ David Hogarth would tell the Royal Geographical Society in 1920, ‘our best knowledge of the Peninsula of Arabia was everywhere sketchy, and of more than half of its great area… it scarcely amounted to anything worth mention. The virtually unknown regions lay in the centre – especially on its western half … The greater part of this last region had been barred as a Holy Land to European explorers unless they would risk themselves in furtive disguise which hindered, if it did not absolutely preclude, them from observing and recording facts and features of geographical interest.’ 1The Tihama, or Red Sea coast of the Hejaz, was still as little mapped as the Antarctic. The British had no reliable map of the interior, could not say for certain how far the Hejaz railway lay from the coast, and could not even enumerate its stations south of al-‘Ula. For the 200-mile stretch between there and Mecca, they could not fix the longitude of any given point, and indeed, did not know exactly where Medina lay nor what it looked like. The only plan they had of the town was a sketch made by Burton seventy years previously. When Lawrence stepped ashore at Jeddah on 19 October 1916, he was aware that he was entering terra incognita.
The revolt was then four months old, and dangerously near crisis. The initiative had been regained by the Turks. It seemed to the British that the Sharif had acted precipitately, though Hussain himself had seen no other choice. In January 1916 he had sent his son Feisal to Damascus, accompanied by a bodyguard of forty tribesmen, to foment mutiny among Arab Divisions of the Ottoman army in Syria and Mesopotamia. To his dismay, Feisal had found that there were no longer any Arab Divisions inSyria, for the resourceful Jamal Pasha – the Military Governor – had sent them off to other fronts and replaced them with Osmanli Divisions. Jamal’s new policy was repressive. In April, he had ordered the public hanging of twenty-one Arab nationalists – including prominent magistrates, writers and intellectuals – in Damascus and Beirut. He was also on the point of dispatching Khairy Bey with an additional 3,500 specially picked and trained soldiers to the Hejaz, ostensibly on their way to the Yemen, to escort a German field mission under Baron Othmar von Stotzingen, but actually to strengthen his hold on the Hejaz. Hussain recognized that the executions symbolized a new confidence on the part of the Turks, encouraged by their successes in Gallipoli and Kut, and suspected that the true purpose of the Khairy Bey mission was to depose him. He knew that he must act before the fresh troops reached Medina. He had already taken the Sheikhs of the Harb, the ‘Utayba, the Juhayna and others into his confidence, and knew he could count on Bedu levies. He had his own trained and blooded camelry of ‘Agayl mercenaries and his Bishah tribal police – highlanders from the hills of the fertile Assir – but virtually no regular troops and no modern equipment, particularly machine-guns or artillery. Nevertheless, Hussain felt confident of his Bedu troops, and only one factor stayed his hand: his son Feisal was still in Syria, and would be seized by jamal as soon as word of hostilities leaked out. Feisal solved the problem cleverly by gulling Jamal into believing that he was returning to the Hejaz only to bring back a force of volunteers for the Turkish army. On 16 May he left Damascus, putting his forty men under the command of his friend Nasib al-Bakri of al-Fatat, with instructions to flee as soon as they received a coded password. By the third week in May he was back in Medina, and the Sharif was free to strike.
At first light on 10 June, the voice of a single muezzin rang out from the minaret of the Grand Mosque at Mecca. It was still cool at that hour, but already the sky was clear as a burning-glass and the eddyless air held the threat of furnace heat. There were dark figures in the streets, Bedu wrapped in cloaks and mantles, with their headcloths tightly knotted across their faces, mingling, hardly noticed, with townsmen hurrying to perform their prayers. At the Jirwal barracks on the Jeddah road, where the garrison commander had spent the night, the Turks slept on, confident in the belief that they were protected by the sentries and guns of the Jiyad fortress – a massive, many-towered redoubt squatting on a stump of shale above the town. The troops were few – less than 1,500 men – for during the sweltering summer season, the Governor moved to cooler quarters in Ta’if with the bulk of the garrison. In the Hamdiyya building, which housed the Ottoman Government Offices, the Vice-Governor, who was already awake and making his ablutions, paused for an instant to take in the beauty of the muezzin’s song. Not far away, in the Hashemite palace, Sharif Hussain was listening carefully to the same clear notes, gazing out of the window, and observing the slowly milling figures in the streets. The Call to Prayers finished abruptly, and for a second there was silence. Then the Sharif picked up his rifle, and, with slow deliberation, fired from the window the shot which officially opened the Arab Revolt.
It was the signal the tribesmen had been waiting for. Instantly, they threw off their cloaks, and let rip a hail of bullets at the three Turkish fortresses, the barracks, the guard-posts and the offices. The troops at the Jirwal awoke to find bullets buzzing through their windows like flies, and, rolling out of bed, the Commander looked about him in confusion. He was under attack, but he had no idea by whom. He listened attentively for the boom of artillery or the rattle of machine-guns which would have accompanied an Allied assault, but heard only the coarser crack and thump of musketry. Glancing out of the window, he saw a scarlet flag flying from the Hashemite palace, but did not distinguish it as the Hashemite emblem, for the Imperial Ottoman banner was also scarlet. Quickly, he cranked the telephone and spoke to the Commander of the battery in the Jiyad fort. Almost at once a terse order brought the gunners to their posts. Puffs of smoke appeared at the gun-ports of the fortress, followed by the crashing roar of shells bursting in the streets. To the Bedu attackers, the guns sounded like thunder-demons. They were armed only with muzzle-loading muskets, and had never heard artillery before. At the Jirwal barracks the Turks had recovered from their initial surprise, and, emboldened by the artillery barrage, were now firing back vigorously. The Commander next telephoned the Sharif: ‘We are under attack by the Bedu,’ he reported. ‘Can you do something about it?’ ‘Certainly,’ Hussain replied calmly, and gave the signal for a renewed attack.
At nine o’clock, when the lambent heat of the day could already be felt in the tight streets, the Commander asked for a parley. The local Arab civil officer marched up to the barracks under a white flag, and informed him: ‘This country has declared its independence from the Ottoman Empire. Hostilities will only cease when your force evacuates the barracks and surrenders its entire armoury to the Arab commander.’ 2Startled by the revelation, but determined to hold out now he knew whom he was fighting, the Commander at once ordered the Jiyad battery to open up. Firing continued sporadically all that day and all through the night, and the next morning a wedge of Bedu, screaming warcries and brandishing daggers and scimitars which flashed venomously in the sunlight, rushed the main guard-house near the Grand Mosque, stove in its doors, and captured its defenders. The following day they attacked the Hamidiyya Building, where the Vice-Vali had by now entrenched himself with his escort. All night he and his men had kept up a withering fire at anyone who came within range, and had shot dead a number of people who were merely plodding to prayer at the mosque. Worming their way from door to door, the Bedu suddenly launched a charge from close range, leaping out of the shadows screaming like banshees. The Turkish soldiers, cowed by their ferocity, dropped their rifles and raised their hands in fright. They were marched up to the Hashemite palace, from where the Vice-Governor sent letters ordering the troops at Jirwal and Jiyad to surrender. The Turkish units adamantly refused to budge, and kept up a continual, rhythmic barrage of shells, ranging them so indiscriminately into the town that they set fire to the Kiswa– the embroidery covering the sacred Ka’aba– the holiest shrine in Islam. They also managed to damage the shrine of Abraham, and to splinter a bas-relief commemorating the life of the Khalif Othman. All of these acts provided excellent propaganda against them, and the last was held up as an ominous sign of their disfavour, since the name Othman was linked with the eponymous ancestor of the Ottoman Turks. The situation was now stalemate, however. The Arabs could not attack the Jiyad with its deadly batteries, and the Turks were unable or unwilling to sally forth. The situation remained static until the beginning of July, when two batteries of mountain-guns arrived with a detachment of Egyptian artillerymen under the command of Sayyid ‘Ali Pasha. Though the guns were archaic, sent hurriedly by Sir Reginald Wingate, Sirdar of the Egyptian Army, from Port Sudan, they were effective at close quarters. Almost at once the batteries knocked out some of the Turkish guns in the Jiyad, and breached the walls, so that the Bedu, who had scaled the surrounding heights, were able to hurl themselves into the fort, where they cut down or captured the entire garrison. They also took five artillery-pieces, 8,000 rifles, and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition. The mountain-guns were then turned on the Jiwal barracks, and a shell-burst set the building ablaze, spreading poisonous smoke through it. The Turks, who had no water to put out the blaze, surrendered on 9 July. In a month’s fighting the Arabs had killed and wounded almost 300 Turks, and had captured the rest. The opening gambit in the Arab Revolt had been an astounding success.
