Текст книги "Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia"

Автор книги: Michael Asher

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Jeddah, Mecca’s port, had long since been taken. Here, Hussain had used gold to raise a section of the Harb – notorious freebooters and highway brigands – under Muhsin ibn Mansour, a brave and highly respected Sharif. The Harb were recalcitrant and unruly, and not entirely to be trusted, but they fought for gold. For days they had massed around Jeddah, and on the morning of 10 June, 3,000 tribesmen had mounted their camels and horses and raced recklessly towards the city gates. The Turks began to rake the plain with artillery, planting great mushrooms of smoke among the running camels, and spattering the vanguard with machine-gun fire. The Harb turned abruptly and withdrew out of range, and Muhsin sent a squadron of camel-riders around to the north-west side of the town to cut off the water supply to the Ottoman garrison, which stood outside the walls. The following day, the Indian Marine ship Hardingeand the light cruiser Foxof the British Red Sea Patrol Squadron beat into the harbour and scourged the garrison with concentrated fire, killing three Turkish gendarmes. The bombardment was repeated daily, until, on 16 June, the carrier Ben-My-Chreedropped anchor off the reef and disgorged a flight of seaplanes which soared over the town walls dropping anti-personnel bombs. The Turkish garrison was demoralized and thirsty. On receiving advice that no reinforcements were on their way, the Commander surrendered to Sharif Muhsin. There was similar success at other ports along the Red Sea Coast. Medina’s port, Yanbu’, and Rabegh – about 120 miles north of Jeddah – were taken by the end of July. Lith and Qunfidhdha, to the south, were captured about the same time, and at Umm Lujj the Turkish troops fled in the desert when Foxput a round up the mainstreet of the town and holed the fort. Ta’if, in the Hejaz highlands seventy-five miles south-east of Mecca, however, had proved a harder nut to crack.

Ta’if, lying on a sandy plain amid fruit orchards and olive groves, 5,000 feet above sea-level, was a walled town which served as a market for the ‘Utayba – one of the most powerful Bedu tribes of central Arabia – as well as a number of smaller semi-nomadic tribes. ‘Abdallah had been sent there with seventy ‘Agayl riders on 1 June, as soon as Hussain had heard the news of Khairy Bey’s advance. He had made a camp near the town, and informed the local Commander, Ahmad Bey, that he was on a raid against the Baqqum, a nomadic tribe of 500 tents inhabiting the wadis of the Assir. Ahmad Bey had been suspicious, but had reckoned that whatever it was the young Sharif was up to, with only seventy poorly armed ‘Agayl he offered very little threat to the Turks, who numbered 3,000, and possessed ten mountain-guns. ‘Abdallah proceeded to send messengers to the camps of the ‘Utayba and other tribes, inviting them to join him, offering money and arms. The Bedu arrived in their camels in small unobtrusive parties over the next few days, and with astonishing speed ‘Abdallah built up his force from seventy to 5,000 men. Ahmad Bey, who visited his camp every evening, watched the foregathering of tribesmen and camels with disquiet. Within a week, the Sharif was ready to order the attack. Then, on the eve of his planned strike, his presence was suddenly requested by Ghalib Pasha, the Governor of the Hejaz. ‘Abdallah’s chiefs counselled caution, but the Sharif rode boldly to Ghalib’s palace escorted by only two Bedu, whom he posted outside the office, instructing them quietly that if anyone tried to arrest him they were to hold off any threat from outside while he dealt with the Vali. ‘Abdallah swept into the Governor’s presence, and found that Ghalib simply wanted to advise him against carrying out his raid on the Baqqum: ‘Rumours are about,’ the Governor said, ‘that a revolt may take place any day now. You see how the people of Ta’if are leaving their homes with their children.’ ³‘Let me carry out the raid,’ ‘Abdallah protested, ‘and the people will regain their confidence.’ At that moment Ahmad Bey entered the room, looking grave, and ‘Abdallah tensed himself for action. The Commander whispered to Ghalib, confessing his suspicions and suggesting that he should arrest ‘Abdallah forthwith. The Sharif watched anxiously, fingering his revolver beneath his cloak. After a few minutes, though, the Governor waved his Commander aside, and ‘Abdallah left freely. No sooner had he regained his camp than he sent his ‘Agayl to cut the telegraph wires to Mecca, and ordered his scouts to stop any messengers leaving or entering Ta’if, by shooting them dead if necessary. On the night of 10 June, his forces surrounded the northern quarter of the city. They were easily repelled, however, for Ahmad Bey had strengthened the town walls with earthworks and trenches. ‘Our attack was made with great violence,’ ‘Abdallah wrote. ‘In the centre our riflemen made a raid and returned with some prisoners and loot. At sunrise the Turkish artillery began to shell us heavily. We were fortunate there was no infantry offensive as well.’ ⁴Over the next few days, the Arabs tried continually to raid individual positions, only to find themselves scattered by the noise of the Turkish guns. The Bani Sa’ad – a local cultivating tribe – were so unnerved that they abandoned the Sharif and decamped for their villages. ‘Abdallah bided his time patiently, however, until, in mid-July, the Egyptian mountain-guns arrived, having been carried in pieces up the Wadi Fatima from Mecca, together with a howitzer the Arabs had captured there. Yet the stand-off continued. ‘Abdallah said later that he had not made as much use of the artillery as he should have done, while the Egyptian gunners later told Hubert Young that the Bedu had been afraid to attack, and had never taken advantage of their bombardments. Eventually, the Sharif’s patience paid off, however: the garrison at Ta’if surrendered on 22 September, and the Governor was taken prisoner.

With a little assistance from the Royal Navy, but with few trained troops and little modern equipment, the Hashemites had captured most of the vital towns of the Hejaz, taking some 6,000 prisoners and a vast amount of military hardware. More than this, they had scored a brilliant propaganda success: Turco-German dreams of a Jihad or Holy War were dead. Jamal Pasha admitted as much publicly in a speech, in which he called Hussain a ‘traitor’ and a ‘vile individual’. For the Arabs, the problem was that Medina, not Mecca, was the key to the Hejaz, and they had not captured it. Medina was not only a self-supporting oasis, far beyond the range of British naval guns, but it was also linked directly to the outside world by the Hejaz railway. By June it had a large garrison of at least 12,000 men under a gifted, resolute and ruthless commander named Fakhri Pasha, the notorious ‘Butcher of Urfa’. Hussain and his sons slowly realized that they had underestimated the power of the railway. While Medina remained in Turkish hands, the Turks could move any amount of men and material into the Hejaz at will, and launch a counter-attack at their leisure.

After raising the flag on 5 June, ‘Ali and Feisal had divided their force of Bedu into three detachments, one of which had torn up the railway tracks north of Medina with their bare hands and flung the rails down the embankment. This achieved nothing, for without explosives they could do no permanent damage, and the Turks, who had repair teams in their fortress-stations, had no shortage of spare track. Muhit was the first station on the railway, thirteen miles northwest of Medina, a solid building of black basalt, guarded by a massive blockhouse, standing under a crust of low hills. On the morning of 8 June, ‘Ali’s snipers poured fire into the buildings from concealed places in the surrounding hills, while another detachment skirmished across the open plain towards the position. The Turks were well-entrenched and easily turned back the advance with a clatter of machine-gun fire. Worse, a large force of infantry under the personal leadership of Fakhri Pasha had sallied forth from Medina, and fell on them from the rear. The Arabs retreated into the hills and regrouped, making a massed sortie against Medina which was again met with a solid wall of fire from artillery and machine-guns. The noise of the cannon so terrified the Bedu that they turned and ran. The ‘Utayba and the ‘Agayl took shelter among the black stones of a lava scree and refused to budge. Feisal, riding a white mare and dressed conspicuously in his finest Sharifian robes, paced up and down steadily through a rain of Turkish bullets and bursting shells trying to rally them. It was to no avail; the Bedu had no experience of this kind of carnage. Feisal had been relying on the Bani ‘Ali, a tribe of cultivators who inhabited the village of ‘Awali outside the town walls, to hold the city’s water supply. But the roar of the guns and the flight of the Bedu irregulars were too much for them. They asked the Turks for a truce, and while they were parleying, Fakhri’s men encircled the village. Then, on a signal, they moved in with fixed bayonets and massacred every man, woman and child, burning the houses and setting machine-guns at the gates to cut down the fleeing victims as they ran out. Feisal and a handful of Bedu who came to the rescue too late were appalled. This wanton butchery of women and children was an atrocity which they would never forget. It was the final nerve-shattering blow to their morale, and the Hashemites were obliged to retreat, first to Bir Mashi, south of the city, and then to Wadi Aqiq. The Turks pursued them as doggedly as bloodhounds, driving them from place to place, until they split up, Feisal taking his troops to Yanbu ‘an-Nakhl – a palm oasis in the hills on the Medina-Yanbu’ road – and ‘Ali to Wadi Ithm, about thirty miles to the south-west of Medina, where, almost out of food, he barely managed to hang on. The Turks now began to push forward relentlessly, collecting camels from the surrounding tribes for transport, capturing and fortifying wells and strong-points. The Arab forces were almost out of supplies and ammunition, and what little they had was reaching them from Mecca, rather than from the beach-head at Rabegh. In mid-July ‘Ali’s force was increased by a detachment of regular Arab soldiers – former members of Ottoman Divisions seized by the British as prisoners-of-war, and released from prison-camps in Egypt as volunteers for the Arab cause. They were under the command of a highly capable young Iraqi artillery officer called Nuri as-Sa’id, who, on reaching ‘Ali’s position, saw that his situation was hopeless. ‘Ali had no information about the enemy’s movements, and Nuri had to locate the three Turkish battalions tracking him by sending out his men as decoys to draw fire. Ammunition was low, and the Turks were in possession of the nearest water sources. Nuri felt that the Bedu troops were incapable of holding a Turkish advance, and advised ‘Ali to withdraw to the coast, where, in the comforting shelter of British naval guns, the nucleus of a regular Arab army might be formed under the command of Aziz ‘Ali al-Masri – another distinguished and brilliant Arab defector from the Turks, who had fought with the Senussi in the Libyan desert, and had now devised a detailed strategy for the Arab Revolt. Al-Masri proposed to form a ‘flying column’ of trained Arab volunteers 8,000 strong, which, with eight mountain-guns, would move north from the Hejaz into Syria, wrecking the railway but never fighting pitched battles with the Turks. The scheme, later to be adapted by Lawrence, was scotched by Hussain, who was suspicious of his Syrian officers and felt that such a ‘flying column’ would be beyond his control. Indeed, the guerrilla strategist al-Masri was later sacked by the Sharif – an irreplaceable loss to the revolt. For now, however, Nuri advised ‘Ali to withdraw to Rabegh. In doing so, the Sharif could also find out why none of the thousands of rifles and tons of supplies the British had landed there had reached them in the field.

In Rabegh, ‘Ali quickly discovered the answer to this last question: the supplies had been stolen by Sheikh Hussain ibn Mubeiriq of the Zebayd Harb, who had been put in charge of the port. Ibn Mubeiriq, who had an old blood-feud with the Hashemites, was secretly a Turkish sympathizer. ‘Ali sent word to his youngest brother, Zayd, who arrived with Ahmad bin Mansur and a troop of his Bani Salem, took possession of ibn Mubeiriq’s villages by force and seized the stores, driving the ‘traitor’ and his men out into the hills where they lingered like malevolent spirits. Instead of returning to the field, however, ‘Ali and Zayd settled down to wait for al-Masri and Nuri as-Sa’id to build up their forces, leaving Feisal to face the Turks alone. The situation was fast becoming critical. Feisal, who had taken up a position on the Darb Sultani– the main road to the coast – had under his command 4,000 irregulars with rifles and the Egyptian artillery, whose ancient field-pieces were far outranged by the Turks’ Krupp mountain-guns. In Medina, Fakhri’s forces now amounted to twelve battalions with sixteen mountain-guns and two heavy field-pieces – thanks to the railway, fresh troops were arriving all the time. Feisal’s forces were unable to meet the Turks head-on, and the Sharif sent camel-mounted raiding-parties, under the ferocious young Sharif ‘Ali ibn Hussain of the Harith, to harass them by night, hitting guard-posts and convoys and fading back into the hills. These pinpricks were hardly felt by the enemy, but they were costly in Arab lives, and Feisal’s Bedu were melting rapidly back to their tents and villages. Feisal could not prevent them: they were hired on a daily rate, and he had no money to pay them with. He was obliged at one point to have a chest filled with heavy stones and put a guard on it at night to convince his troops that he was still solvent. Feisal felt that at the very most he could hold out for three weeks, but to push the Turks back to Medina was now impossible. At the end of August he rode down to the coast, where at Yanbu’ he met Lieutenant-Colonel Cyril Wilson, who had been posted to jeddah as British representative. Wilson, who was actually Governor of the Red Sea Province of the Sudan, was spokesman for Sir Reginald Wingate, the officer responsible for supplying the Hashemites from neighbouring Port Sudan. This had been Feisal’s first meeting with a British officer, and he had complained volubly about the lack of ammunition and supplies, which were supposed to be reaching him from the beach-head at Rabegh. He wanted machine-guns, modern artillery and aircraft, as well as a contingent of British troops at Rabegh. The Turks were clearly building up for an advance on Mecca, for which Rabegh, as the major source of water on the Darb Sultani, would be a vital stepping-stone. The Arab regulars at Rabegh were not yet ready to hold it, and the Bedu could not hold it either. Feisal felt that the only solution was to land a seasoned British brigade. Hussain agreed that such a landing was necessary, but thought it should be limited to 300 men. He feared to allow Christian soldiers – or even Muslim soldiers in Christian pay – to land en masseon sacred soil, for the Turks, who had now appointed a rival Sharif, ‘Ali Haydar, as Emir of Mecca in his place, were already declaring that Hussain had ‘sold out’ to the British infidels. On recapturing Mecca, their first act would be to hang Hussain publicly as a traitor and install ‘Ali Haydar as Emir. Feisal met Wilson for a second time in early September, together with Lieutenant-Colonel A. C. Parker – now posted to the Hejaz as intelligence officer – and repeated his urgent request for British troops at Rabegh. Wilson and Parker were convinced that the Arab Revolt was about to collapse, and had rushed to Cairo on the Dufferinto persuade Murray to send a British force. As September faded into October, though, no such force arrived. The weather grew cooler and a Turkish advance on Mecca looked increasingly imminent. All that stood in the way of the juggernaut was the thin, ragged band of Feisal’s Bedu, hidden in the hills.

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.

This was to come later. For the moment ‘Abdallah sat out the meeting stoically. Lawrence, who had spoken little, had taken an immediate dislike to him. The Sharif, he admitted later, was ‘too clever’. He knew that ‘Abdallah was his father’s right-hand man, and highly popular among the Arabs. He had been the prime mover in the revolt from the beginning – indeed, in many ways it might be said that ‘Abdallah had createdthe Arab Revolt. Cheerful, extrovert, highly cultured and sophisticated, he did not fit Lawrence’s concept of the ‘noble savage’, and bore no relation to his ‘innocent’ Dahoum. He was of strong character – highly intelligent, worldly-wise, experienced, blooded in battle, and a superb chess-player – more than a match for Lawrence’s manipulation. If the British were to influence the situation to their advantage, Lawrence realized, they must find and set up as a figurehead a leader who was more malleable and susceptible to their design. He had been monitoring affairs in the Hejaz closely since June, and knew that the situation was critical. The revolt, he said, was ‘standing still, which, with an irregular war, was a prelude to disaster’. ⁴Secretly, though, he was against sending British troops, but for other reasons than those argued by Murray. First, as an arch-propagandist, he was aware that guerrilla wars were fought partly on an ideological level, and to have infidel soldiers in the Hejaz would make Hussain look like a Muslim renegade ready to hand over the Holy Cities to unbelievers. Secondly – and to Lawrence even more important – if the British were to fight Arab battles for them, the Arabs would have little claim, at the end of the war, to an independent state. They must, at least, be seento be conducting their own revolt. Lawrence had a passionate belief in the cause of Arab freedom, but though he wished to see the Arabs free of the Ottoman Turks, it is unlikely that he ever believed they could be entirely independent. From the beginning he envisaged not a single Arab state but a congeries of petty states, nominally independent but actually under the benevolent aegis of the British Empire, which would naturally fill the vacuum in the Near East left by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The war had to be won, and British and Arab interests dovetailed at this point: both wanted victory against the Turks. Lawrence could therefore happily serve both the cause of British victory and Arab independence, satisfied that, for now, there was no conflict between them. If such a conflict arose, though, he had no doubt where his true loyalties lay: ‘I’m strongly pro-British and also pro-Arab,’ he would tell Clayton later, ‘France takes third place with me: but I quite recognize that we might have to sell our small friends to pay our big friends, or sell our future security in the Near East to pay for our present victory in Flanders.’ ⁵Though he may secretly have divined that the Hashemite problem lay in poor leadership, and privately decided that he could provide the guidance they needed, he was a committed intelligence officer, and never saw himself ‘leading from the front’. Indeed, he had not expected, nor wished, to be sent into the field. He firmly believed that his place was behind a desk, and in the past months had done an excellent job in designing and having printed a set of Hejaz postage stamps whose object was to establish before the eyes of the world that the Hejaz was, in fact, already independent.

Lawrence’s first mission to the Hejaz had come about in an indirect way. In May, General Murray had made more changes to his intelligence organization, stripping Clayton of his carte blancheand assigning him solely to the work of the Arab Bureau, which was now under the direction of Major Kinahan Cornwallis. The Intelligence Department in Cairo, of which Lawrence remained a member, was to be reunited with its Ismaeliyya counterpart under the command of Major G. V. W. Holdich. The Bureau and the Intelligence Department were to remain quite distinct entities. Lawrence did not wish to be separated from Clayton, and had sounded out the possibility of a transfer to the Bureau. When Holdich had barred any such transfer, Lawrence had resorted to guerrilla tactics, plaguing senior officers by correcting the grammar in their reports, and mocking their poor knowledge of geography and customs in the Near East. One morning a staff officer had phoned him, demanding to know where certain divisions of the Turkish army were currently located. Lawrence had given him a thoroughly competent description of the composition and location of the divisions, to the extent of pinpointing the actual villages in which they were quartered.

‘Have you noted them in the Dislocation files?’ the officer asked.

‘No,’ Lawrence replied, ‘they are better in my head until I can check the information.’

‘Yes,’ said the officer. ‘But you can’t send your head along to Ismaeliyya every time.’

‘I wish to goodness I could,’ Lawrence concluded, ringing off.

Such ploys amounted to insubordination, and had not endeared Lawrence to his superiors. Finally, he had taken his case to Clayton, who had agreed to request his transfer through London, in order to circumvent Holdich. Meanwhile he managed to get Lawrence out of the way by asking to ‘borrow’ him from GHQ. Clayton’s major problem with the Hejaz was that, bereft of any intelligence officers in the front line, he had little idea of what was really happening, or how many troops were involved. Parker – the Hejaz IO – was largely confined to Rabegh, and while both he and Wilson had met Feisal, they felt that the Sharif tended to exaggerate, claiming, for instance, that the Turks massed against him numbered 25,000 strong. This was clearly nonsense, but Clayton wondered what other exaggerations were being passed off in the name of truth. Frankly, he did not trust Wilson’s judgement either, and suspected him of doctoring intelligence reports to agree with his own assessments, and indeed, he sometimes wondered if Wilson was entirely compos mentis.What were the actual dimensions of the threat from Medina? Parker, in Rabegh, had been pressing Clayton for some time to send an officer inland to obtain desperately needed intelligence, and had clearly hoped to go up country himself. On 9 October, though, Clayton wrote to Wingate that Storrs was being sent back there to see ‘Abdallah and possibly Hussain. ‘I propose to send Lawrence with him, if GHQ will let him go,’ he wrote. ‘They ought to be of use, and between them bring back a good appreciation of the situation.’ ⁶They had left Suez on the Lamaon 14 October. Lawrence would later claim to have gone down to the Hejaz on his own initiative, to find ‘the master spirit’ of the revolt, and wrote that he had asked for two weeks’ leave. Storrs, on the other hand, claimed that he had requested Lawrence for the expedition, simply because he enjoyed his company, and had thus created ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ as well as the Arab Revolt. The leave was a fact – a technicality designed to undermine any protests Holdich might have produced – but Storrs’s claim to have applied for him, like his own claim to have gone there of his own choosing, was spurious. He had been sent to the Hejaz by the Arab Bureau, and he had been sent with a particular – and vital – mission in mind.

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