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Journal
of the T. E. Lawrence Society Vol. I, No. 1, Spring 1991 Edited by Jeremy Wilson Mecca's revolt against the Turk D.
G. Hogarth I heard of an Arab national movement for the first time on a singularly inappropriate occasion - at a banquet held in London in 1910 to greet Talaat Bey and his brother deputies, who had left their brand-new chamber to salute the mother of parliaments. A Mussulman sat on my right and another on my left, and both, I soon found, had provided themselves, in the parts of the unfaithful, with a plenary dispensation from the prohibition law of their prophet. A few yards farther up the table the chairman was dilating on the union of hearts in the Near East, and I, for my part, sat back, at peace with the world. Not so the deputy on my left, who represented the remote constituency of Jiddah. He had a little English, but Indian masters had not taught him to follow the stately periods of our public oratory; so he applied himself in stage whispers to my private ear. Turks were swine. This 'Ottoman nation' was to be just Turks. Arabs had their due of neither seats nor office; their sacred tongue was prohibited in the ministries, and their history in the schools. Better Abdul-Hamid than Talaat. Decentralization, home rule - he had the words pat - the Arabs would have, or else - I felt uneasy, for round about were types that in other days I should have known for 'palace spies'; but I was not inordinately astonished, for I had been in Constantinople a few months earlier and had learned before I left it that if the recent revolution had made a new heaven, it was not troubling itself seriously about a new earth. Less than a year later I heard more in Syria. The sleeping sense of the Syrians had been stirred at last by religious teachers bewailing the ancient glories and once pure faith of their race. They were few, but enough to prepare the volatile Arab to strike the stars with his head when, in 1908, a message of liberty sounded from Macedonia. The Intelligentsia took fire at once, Moslem, Christian, and Hebrew alike. Syrians were not anti-Turk then, nor had they ever been strongly anti-Hamidian. Thanks to the power of Izzet Pasha el-Abid in the councils of the tyrant, their land had suffered less than other provinces and enjoyed more betterment. During the reign something like law and order had come into being in the desert fringes and some modern development of its towns and ports. It only wanted to be pro-Committee of Union and Progress (C.U.P.), but with its American and French education it took seriously the 'liberty, equality, fraternity' talk of the Young Turks, and incontinently began to speak of an Arab nation, to vaunt its history and literature, and to found clubs, even at Constantinople, for their glorification. The powers that were on the committee, however, understood by union (and not illogically) one tradition and hope and one official speech within one Ottoman nation, and by progress, the fruits of such a union. How else, they asked, would the Ottoman peoples speak and act together, and confront the world as one polity with, above all things, one army? The Syrian Intelligentsia was brought down to earth with a crash. Arab deputies heard plain words in the chamber and plainer at meetings of the C.U.P., and a leading Arab club at Constantinople was suppressed at once in order to discourage the rest. The Syrians grumbled, and some wilder folk at Kerak, in the Hauran and down in Asir took up arms, but could do nothing. The movement seemed stillborn. Then came, one on another, the Italian and the Balkan wars, with ebbing and flowing of hopes, which bred secret societies and conspiracy, and overtures to foreign consulates, chiefly French, for two long years. Finally the Treaty of Bukharest and the Turkish reoccupation of Adrianople dropped on the whole movement like a guillotine blade. The face of the C.U P. was saved. The powers, as usual, fell again to courting the sick man: one lent him money, another instructors, civil, naval, military; and ever more patently the aegis of the strongest war lord in Europe was spread above him. The Syrians ran to hide. Arabs are not bad conspirators. They can keep faith with one another as well as most, and their secret from the enemy; but these particular Arabs knew they could not cope with the C.U.P. in discipline and organizing energy. The local Ottoman administration either had little knowledge or took little account then of the Syrian clubs; but many members of these, aware of a share in such recent ebullitions as the formation of the military section of the Kahtaniya, whose program called all creeds to arms, or the Beirut strike against the suppression of the Reform Club, were disinclined to take the chance of the C.U.P. becoming better informed or more solicitous. The too timid or the too deeply committed of Beirut, Damascus, and Aleppo stole away to Egypt, and there foregathered in the years 1913 and 1914 with other malcontent Ottomans, with agents provocateurs, with spies of the C.U.P., and with all the familiar following of Near-Eastern unrest fermenting in a foreign asylum. Arab deputies, journeying to and from Constantinople, were frequent visitors at the humming cafés, divans, and bars of Cairo and Alexandria, and among them sons of Sherif Husein, Emir of Mecca, passed through Egypt more than once. Their father, then no better than a name outside his own Hedjaz, had already dreamed of a day when he might rule Mecca for the caliph without a Turkish governor or garrison; and emboldened by growing influence with the tribes and by contempt of the farce of government, civil and military, which was the best the Turks could play in Arabia, all preoccupied as they were with distant wars, he thought of emulating Ibn Saud, Emir of Nejd, the only Arab to strike a blow after the Balkan War, who had turned the Turks out of Hasa. But a project to hold up the gathered pilgrims at the great feast till the European powers, to free their subjects, should make his terms with the Porte, had not survived mature reflection. Now, during a passing visit to Cairo, his second son, Abdullah, called, as his condition demanded, on Lord Kitchener, but gained nothing for the moment beyond sympathetic attention from the great man's Oriental secretary, Ronald Storrs, whose duty was to appraise the conspiracies of the cafés with an eye, not to impossibilities in Arabia, but to possibilities in Egypt. At that moment, of course, no one was thinking of the coming war, least of all with Turkey. But Lord Kitchener, aware of the revival of pro-Turk feeling in Egypt, which the Sinaitic boundary dispute of 1906 - the so-called `Tabah Incident' - had first brought to the light, had been concerned for some time about the failure of our embassy at Constantinople to make friends with, or head against, the real power there or to counteract the steady absorption of Turkey into a German sphere of influence. Behind the embassy stood the home Government, and behind this again the British public, growing ever less sympathetic to the Young Turks. Even the Liberals who welcomed the manifesto of 1908 and applauded the victory of 1909 had been alienated by the Adana massacre, by the C.U.P.'s policy in Macedonia, and by recent sympathy with Greeks, Bulgars, and Serbs. Kitchener therefore could change nothing, but when war broke out with the Central powers, and it grew clearer and clearer that Turkey would join the array and preach a holy war, he bethought himself, or was reminded, of Sherif Abdullah and the dormant nationalism of the Arabs. That, in the event of war with Turkey, we should invite the Arab-speaking communities to throw off her yoke was inevitable, notwithstanding the small addition which their military contribution promised. The liberation of subject races in the Ottoman Empire is a traditional preoccupation of the British public, and meagre success has not hurt its enthusiasm. No ministry, forced into hostilities with the Turks, would have been suffered to abstain long from the declaration of a Pro-Arab policy, and from measures to enforce it. Kitchener's responsibility in 1914, therefore, was not for the adoption of such a policy, but only for the initial measures taken to declare it and put it in action. Obviously, the Arab society to be invited to take the lead in liberation was the Syrian, which was distinctly the most advanced in civilization and alone had manifested a general nationalist spirit. But, apart from great difficulty in communicating with its leaders, and still greater difficulty in determining which of them, if any, would be generally followed, it was futile, even criminal, to attempt to foster a general rising in Syria till Asiatic Turkey should have been cut at the waist by a military landing in force at or near Alexandretta, on the racial frontier between the Turk and the Arab. Till that operation could be carried out - and it was not only projected definitely, but prepared actively from November, 1914 - Syria was best left in peace. Our declaration and our earnest of action must be communicated to the Arabs at some other point. Kitchener, then in London, persuaded his Government to let the ground be tried in the remote Arab province of Hedjaz, and a messenger was despatched from Cairo to sound Sherif Abdullah about the wishes and aims of his father should Turkey join our enemies in arms. The reply demanded a guaranty of Arab national independence. On the day of Turkey's entry into the war this was given without reserve, should the Arabs, as champions of Islam, take the field for our alliance. Even, however, if Syria were closed, why was this particular Arab, Husein, Emir of Mecca, a man long past the prime of life and of meagre resources, chosen to give and enforce our message to the Arabian race? He enjoyed no personal sanctity, no wide prestige for capacity or sacred learning, nor had he been named to us for spokesman by the nationalist clubs. The reply is that he controlled Mecca. We appealed to him on account, first and last, of the city of his authority. We were faced with the immediate proclamation of a holy war by the caliph. Whether or not a general holy war can be accepted by Moslems in these days of wide dispersion and distinctions of creed, at least there can be no unanimous response to the call if Mecca holds aloof, still less if she declares against it. The voice of her local chieftain is the only one which can be heard in Islam against the call of the caliph. Moslems in general might receive it with anger, even with contempt, but not with indifference. Moreover, we had to find some chief, widely known, if only by his title, whose local situation in the Ottoman Empire made it humanly possible for him to rise and endure in arms long enough to affect the course of the war. Other Arabs chiefs, protected by distance and deserts, disposed of more resources and better fighting material than Husein - Ibn Saud, for example, and the Imam Yahya of Yemen - but they were sectaries or of only local power. Looking aside from the semi- independent princes of the peninsula to the settled Arabs of Syria and Mesopotamia, we saw a level mediocrity. Lastly, a strategical consideration had weight. The narrow Red Sea passage, flanged on its northern part by the Hedjaz railway, lay open to Turco-German enterprise; and submarine and wireless stations, or jumping-off points for enemy emissaries to the farther East or Africa, might easily be found on its long eastern shore. But not only could Hedjaz cut communications with Yemen, but its revolt might render the railway useless and the coast southward from Akaba virtually inaccessible to Turks and Germans. For many months, however, Husein made no sign. His mood was to wait and see. With Turkish governors and garrisons established in the Hedjaz towns, Husein, having little money and less armament, must still be their candid and rather oppressive friend. Asked for Ottoman recruits, he levied a regiment of no-man's men and sent it under his eldest son, Ali, to Medina, where, after his demand that it should halt and the Turkish battalions leave for service in the north, had been rejected, a part of it entrained to supply us with some prisoners when the Turks attacked Katia in the spring of 1916. Nor would Husein refuse to help the Emden party out of its desperate pass near Jiddah in March, 1915. Later in that year his third son, Feisal, who had gone to Constantinople, reported ill of our prospects in the Gallipoli peninsula, and Husein therefore contented himself with extending the radius of his pecuniary resources, and his local influence in the peninsula, affronting Ibn Saud by transactions with the great Ateiba tribe and by proclaiming that he had saved him from the Ibn Rashid's attack. The last was the worst affront of the two. For our part, after opposition to all plans for the landing near Alexandretta had caused them to be abandoned once for all and our preparations to be diverted to other ends, leaving no reasonable way of promoting a successful Syrian revolt, we fell into neglect of the Arab question. To the exiles who beset us in Egypt with requests for money and arms, each in turn asseverating he could raise the Syrians as one man, we turned reluctantly a deaf ear, well knowing such wild-cat enterprises as theirs would make the last state of a stricken land worse than the first. We did, indeed, proclaim our intention to support the Arab cause to the Egyptians and the Sudanese, neither of whom, to tell the truth, displayed enthusiasm for it. But that platonic demonstration was little more than the natural consequence of an earlier proclamation issued from London, which, inspired by the first, or Syrian, plan of our Arab policy and adumbrating only a remote possibility of war spreading to Arabia, had assured Moslems that their holy cities, with the port of Jiddah, should be exempt from military operations, a pledge of which the British naval officer who commanded before that port a year later was honestly unaware. As the summer drew on, the Arab question receded still further from practical politics. Our armies, checked in the Gallipoli peninsula, weak in Mesopotamia, stationary on the canal, gave little promise of achieving anything decisive in the Eastern theaters; whereas on the enemy side the thoroughness with which Jemal Pasha was combing 'Young Arabs' out of Syria did promise to remove at no distant date the last possibility of its revolt. Yet from that very disaster of the Arabs in one part of their lands came the impulse which ultimately caused the liberation of all; for it was the report of those Syrian 'atrocities,' exciting perhaps some fear of their repetition in Hedjaz, which determined Emir Husein's ultimate decision. Among many Syrians who tried to flee from Jemal's police, some were caught on the frontier of Hedjaz, and one at least died well, leaving a strangely moving message, which spread far and wide. Others passed through to Mecca, and finding asylum at the emir's court, told their tales, and for the first time, so far as we know, asked Husein to rise in the name of all Arabs. The emir, who was discouraged by reports from his son Feisal, newly returned from Jerusalem, and, like him, unwilling to do anything to impair the strength of Islam, hesitated for the last time. At length, in July, he signed a letter to Abdullah's friend Ronald Storrs. The memory of Syrian martyrs and the presence of Syrian exiles determined its tenor. It invited a 'firm offer' for Arab co-operation. The future area of Arab national independence, to which we had given no bounds in space, must be understood to extend northward between the sea and the Persian frontier up to the thirty-seventh parallel of latitude. Husein excepted Aden, but not any part of Mesopotamia or any part of Syria, not even Turk-speaking districts north of Aleppo and in Cilicia. For the entire independence of all that area equally both parties must engage to fight, neither giving up the battle without the other. I was in Cairo when this reminder of an almost forgotten policy and invitation to take our main action upon it in one of the most barbarous Arab provinces, instead of that obviously best fitted to lead in nation-making, came under discussion. It was not a cheerful time. Our warfare made no progress in the west, and the shadow of failure in the Dardanelles darkened our prospect on the canal. A rising in Hedjaz might make, it was true, a timely diversion; but its fighting men,
how should he stand up anywhere but in his own wastes before troops we could not dislodge? It was a vague answer we sent at last to Mecca. Was the emir seriously expecting more than his own independence in Hedjaz, or was he talking big, as one talks in opening a bargain in the East? The rejoinder came very quickly, considering the perilous path it had to travel, and it left no room for doubting the mind of Husein. This time he addressed himself directly to Sir Henry McMahon, chief officer of the British Government in Egypt, and wrote as spokesman of a nation to which acceptance of its full territorial claim must be an affair of life or death. His offer and his conditions were equally embarrassing. Experience of nearly a twelvemonth had almost dispelled our fear of a holy war; the few isolated points where it had broken out were exceptions proving a rule that Islam, beyond reach of Turkish help, would not rise in arms. The menace in the Red Sea loomed also less large - less large than, as we were to know some months later, it might still prove to be. We had just learned from Idrisi's farcical campaign against Loheia how poorly Arab levies would acquit themselves against Turkish regulars. On the whole, useful as the moral influence of Mecca might be, we did not now desire Husein to take arms in his impenetrable Holy Land. On the other hand, we were pledged to him, and to refuse his whole-hearted offer to fulfil his part of the bargain would be less than fair even in war. Not less embarrassing were his territorial conditions. If, reasonably, we could refuse to recognise Cilicia and northernmost Syria as Arabic irredenta, there was no denying the Arabism of Basra, which the Viceroy of India had publicly pledged us to retain, or the Arabism of Syria, where France maintained unabated her old, but undefined, claim. The upshot of such debate in Cairo and London was contained in a second letter from Sir Henry McMahon, dispatched in October. Speaking for the British Government, he barred the Turk-speaking districts of north Syria and also its coast-line, with the Lebanon as far south as the range runs; further, he declined to be committed about any other part of Syria in which our ally, France, should prefer interests. Basra was reserved for special consideration in the future. These reservations were not withdrawn in any subsequent correspondence with the emir, nor did he for his part abate a jot of his original claim in behalf of the Arab nation saving and except to Cilicia. But in his fourth letter, dated at the opening of 1916, he did explicitly agree to differ on territorial questions and to put the dispute to sleep till the day of peace and meanwhile get on with the war. A final friendly warning from Sir Henry to the effect that on that day our obligations to France would certainly be not less binding upon us than before provoked no comment from Mecca; and thereafter Husein was content to correspond only about money and supplies, ammunition and rifles, making demands to which we could respond but tardily, partly because of difficulties of delivery while the Turks remained in Hedjaz, partly because in 1916 rifles and all munitions were still desperately hard to come by. In five months a few thousand Japanese weapons of doubtful utility represented the most we could procure and run ashore. It was the fixed belief of Cairo, at any rate, that these would never be used to promote anything more serious than an increase of the usual Bedouin unrest, which Husein was in a position to direct without much danger to himself. To send him modern guns was useless - he had not a man to handle them - and we could not then foresee the possibility of introducing any one into Hedjaz to assist his incapacity to organise or equip regular warfare. In May, 1916, he seemed hardly fitter to take the field than a year before. I cannot speak at first hand about London at the moment when conversations on the Arab question began with French representatives, but when I returned from Cairo at the end of 1915 I found it being discussed seriously only as it might affect Syria, no one in authority heeding Husein's claim to speak for more than himself, or to give pledges on behalf of an Arab nation. Even the Syrian question was regarded as academic except in so far as it was disturbing the mind of our most important ally. The earlier London conversations, whose inception was owed less to sherifian negotiations than to previous difficulties about operations on the Syrian coast, were directed in chief to reassuring France. As time went on, the increasing preoccupation of our Government with matters of more obvious urgency allowed the conversations to devolve upon subordinates, and by the time I reached London Sir Mark Sykes was for all practical purposes in sole charge in the British behalf, negotiating directly with M. Georges Picot. Sykes had gained, in an honorary diplomatic position at Constantinople and in several tours in Asiatic Turkey, an acquaintance with some parts of the Near East, which led to his interesting himself as an amateur in the Arabs of the past and as an enthusiast in Arabs of the present. Such qualification, added to popularity as a rising politician, his assured position in society, and his honourable character, commended him to harassed ministers anxious to shift anything possible to other shoulders. So long as he succeeded in placating France, he was free to provide, if it pleased his fancy, for a future Arab state; and so long as French claims were kept intact against a future day, M. Picot was free to second a fantasy in which his Government believed no more than the British. Both negotiatiors left Emir Husein out of the picture; and thus in the spring of 1916 an agreement was reached without much difficulty. One power wanted Syria; the other did not. Neither expected it to be in the market, or believed that any Arab could bid for it either during the war or after. When one party, negotiating for the future, desires a commodity, and the other prefers agreement, the former is likely to get the lion's share, and such a share M. Picot certainly did get for his Government and for the French colonial party from which he often expressed dissent, but never departed. Under this 'bearskin pact' France earmarked at least three parts of Syria to Great Britain's one, while a fifth part, Palestine, was to pass under international control. A large interest conceded to a third party, czarist Russia, would affect only Kurds, Armenians, and Turks. Great Britain's compensation was to be in Mesopotamia, if and when she should conquer it; but separate conquest was to confer no separate right, the geographical distribution of the Allied forces being regarded as ordained in common to a common end. No other Arab territories were provided for expressly; but silence seemed to imply consent that all peninsular Arabia, except perhaps Hedjaz, should fall into an exclusive British sphere of influence. Throughout the negotiations the French representative had known of Cairo's correspondence with Emir Husein; and since neither before that time nor later was any treaty made with him, there was no more to know. M. Picot and his Government took then as little account of Hedjaz as we did, not expecting it to affect in any way the issue of the war or the ultimate Syrian question, although pro forma the parties to the agreement engaged mutually to promote and support an Arab independent state or states in the interior of Syria should occasion ever arise for such to be constituted. Wisdom after the fact condemns that agreement for its failure to provide for the claim of the Arabs themselves to an ultimate voice in their own destiny, even if at the moment their embryonic and anarchic 'nation' could not have been made a party to it. But it must be borne in mind at the same time that in April, 1916, the prospect of Arabs taking any part in their own liberation was nebulous. Even in Hedjaz revolt seemed further off than ever. Husein, in response to hints from Cairo, which was growing a little weary of dispatching driblets of arms and cash into the blue, had lately done no more than speak vaguely by his messengers of raising his flag 'after Ramadan' or again 'after the Haj' - that is, the latter part of September in that year - and Cairo, which knew all his unreadiness, interpreted these promises as the eternal 'tomorrow' of the Arab - his Greek calends. Moreover, Hedjaz, even if it should rise, seemed little likely to affect Syria, a thousand miles north of Mecca. And wisdom after the fact may be reminded that in all human probability Husein's revolt would have ended as it began - a revolt in Hedjaz - but for the eventual entry, impossible to foresee in April, 1916, of two personalities on the local scene, Allenby and Lawrence. But one never knows in the East. Less than a month later a signal, transmitted by a Red Sea patrol-ship, informed Cairo that the emir had communicated his intention to revolt without further delay for urgent, but unspecified, reasons, and begged instantly that a representative of the British Government repair to the Hedjaz coast to hear his plans and confer with Abdullah. The news caused equal consternation and surprise. Not nearly enough material and sinews of war had been put into Hedjaz, nor were we ready to co-operate in any other part of the Arab area. Should effervescence ensue in Syria, it would find us unable to reach the imperilled population by land or by sea. Nevertheless, while in honour we could not abandon the emir to his fate, we must at least know what was toward. Storrs, being known to Abdullah, was deputed to go to the Hedjaz coast, and K. Cornwallis and I went with him, we two being the officers of the then infant 'Arab Bureau.' At that date Storrs was still the leading personality in the Hedjaz negotiation despite his subordinate official position at Cairo, but already he was tiring of a dilatory and unpromising affair. His was not the faith or the character of Mark Sykes. Other protagonists since the first had been Sir Henry McMahon, and Lieutenant-Colonel G. F. Clayton, director of military intelligence. The first put all his singular acumen, courage, and deliberate forethought into the Arab business, finding perhaps more scope therein than in English affairs, overidden as they were then by military law. The second, diplomatist rather than soldier, of long and clear vision, may claim to have guided first and last the most of our Arab policy. Two other names should be cited. Sir Reginald Wingate, sighing at Khartum, in a day of great events, for a new world to conquer, had not failed from the first to urge that Hedjaz be brought into the war; and T.E. Lawrence, whose power of initiative, reasoned audacity, compelling personality, and singular persuasiveness I had often had reason to confess in past years, was still a second lieutenant in the Cairo military intelligence, but with a purpose more clearly foreseen than perhaps that of any one else, he was already pulling the wires. His day of direct action was near at hand. It was a very warm ship that took us down the Red Sea, curious what we were to hear. Touching at Port Sudan to pick up the emir's messenger, we learned little more from him than that his master meant all he had said; but not being over sure of us, wished to see his man again before appointing a time and place for conference. So we ferried the old sheik across through wicked reefs by a passage known probably to no large craft except our ship, and brought him to a blistered strand north of Jiddah, where his home stood among a few palms and sandy patches of cornland. In the evening we carried him on southward and landed him at the nearest point to Mecca. Making tryst with him for the third day, we turned northward, to fill in time standing on and off the blockaded coast. We made the near acquaintance of an island as scorched by heaven as any vent of earth's fires, and of long miles of submerged coral, greens and blues dappled with gold. Afar above the morning mists we saw the majesty of Jebel Radhwa, and below, little sun-struck ports still held by Turks. A naked fisherman paddled his bark canoe through the shark-infested sea to tell an incredible tale of German officers and a German lady gone southward to Yambo a few days before, and on the morrow, off Yambo itself, we heard of this party again as lodged with the Turkish governor of the fort; but we passed on southward, believing in nothing but some sudden advent of Europised Turks in unfamiliar uniforms. The fisherman, however, had not been deceived, and in his tale had lurked the secret of the precipitation of the Hedjaz revolt. Germans had indeed come down from El-Ala on the Hedjaz Railway to Yambo, including a major on the staff, Baron Othmar von Stotzingen, with at least two aides. His body servant was an Indian deserter from our side, with whom he communicated in English; his interpreter, the notorious . . . Heinrich Neufeld. The latter's Kurdish bride from Damascus, some fifty years his junior, was the 'German lady.' This party was after doing just what we had used to fear; namely, organizing stations for enemy offence and propaganda down the Red Sea coast, coincidentally with the march of a picked Turkish force from Medina and Mecca to the south. That force, appearing in Medina unknown to us, but reported by Sherif Ali to his father, had determined Husein to revolt at once lest a worse thing befall him. The Germans, whose mission was not to the liking of Ahmed Jemal, Pasha of Damascus, had been stopped short of holy Medina and sent round by the coast road to rejoin beyond Hedjaz. But they did not pass Yambo. Warned of the imminence of revolt, Stotzingen, with Neufeld and his lady, headed back, and succeeded in reaching the railway again; but others of the party, trying to follow northward by boat, were caught and, it is said, drowned, but not before the papers had been taken from their persons, which would reveal what has just been told and not a little besides. Had the sherifian revolt never done anything else than frustrate that combined march of Turks and Germans to southern Arabia in 1916, we should owe it more than we have paid to this day. The sheik duly kept the tryst on the third day, bringing word from Mecca that not Abdullah, but his youngest brother, Zeid, would be on the shore at daybreak a few miles farther south. The revolt was all but declared, and Abdullah must stay by his father. We had not come so far to see a boy, but there was no help for it, and we slipped down before sunset to an anchorage as near as might be to the reefs which guarded the desolate spot appointed. The day was well begun, however, before any horsemen could be descried moving down through the dunes, and when we rowed in, bumping over the coral, the June sun was fierce. Cavalry appeared above the beach, and Storrs was bidden alone to the tent prepared, while the rest of us had to grill on a molten, shadeless sea. At last he reappeared, leading Zeid and a pockmarked man, well known in the revolt as Sherif Shakir, Emir of the Ateiba, to the bark canoe which alone could cross the inner reefs. They came aboard our boat, and we all went out to the ship, which had been joined meanwhile by another, under the officer commanding in the Red Sea; and after drink and food the conference was set. The news was decisive: the banner of revolt had been raised by Sherif Ali the day before outside Medina. Mecca was to follow in three days' time, and Jiddah and Taif would be invested. Husein wanted guns and gunners, more rifles, more munitions, more money, and again guns. We would do our best, and our ships' guns would help the Arabs at Jiddah (none of us knew there and then of any commitment to keep it out of the war!) This offer, however was not well received. Would we not cut off the Turks of Europe by seizing Alexandretta? That proposition, it was objected, would have to be referred to the Council of the Allies; but the Hedjaz Railway should be cut if possible. The boy protested that all his father's hope was in us. He was plainly nervous, while Shakir was very watchful; but we parted good friends, they to ride all night for Mecca, we to steam for Suez. The day after we landed in Egypt Husein called out his Meccans against the Turks in the forts and barracks, Taif was invested, Jiddah was attacked, and the revolt was afoot. That revolt was to keep the field for more than two years. It would not have been begun but for Kitchener's invitation in the first instance, and assurance of British support in the second; it could not have been sustained without the money, food-stuffs, and munitions of war which Great Britain provided; it might never have spread beyond Hedjaz but for the long sight and audacious action of Lawrence; and it won through to Damascus only as a flying right wing of Allenby's last drive. Nevertheless, it was primarily an Arab affair. Husein's courage and activity brought it into being, won its early successes, and upheld it through subsequent reaction; Feisal's faith and diplomacy prepared its way northward, and his liberal leadership converted his army from Islam to nationalism. Finally, it was the Ruwalla Bedouins of Nuri Shaalan - Arabs of Arabs - who forced it through to its goal ahead of all Allies. Its armies fought throughout under men of their race; none of their European lieutenants, not even Lawrence, ever took the command. As rebel forces go, this of the Arabs can claim as fairly as any in history to have been a national force, which brought a nation to the birth; and if Syria owes her liberation chiefly to alien arms, the actual pride of self-respect, which makes the Syrians a nation, rests on the fact that liberation was not accomplished without a prolonged military effort, sustained to victory, by men of Arab race. Back to the contents page for this issue This first issue of the Journal is no longer in print. You can order other issues from the online shop. It is not necessary to be a member of the T. E. Lawrence Society. |