Title: Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Author: T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935)
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Title:      Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Author:     T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935)





To S.A.

I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house,
that your eyes might be shining for me
When we came.

Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near
and saw you waiting:
When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy he outran  me
and took you apart:
Into his quietness.

Love, the way-weary, groped to your body, our brief wage
ours for the moment
Before earth's soft hand explored your shape, and the blind
worms grew fat upon
Your substance.

Men prayed me that I set our work, the inviolate house,
as a menory of you.
But for fit monument I shattered it, unfinished: and now
The little things creep out to patch themselves hovels
in the marred shadow
Of your gift.





Mr Geoffrey Dawson persuaded All Souls College to give me leisure,
in 1919-1920, to write about the Arab Revolt. Sir Herbert Baker let me
live and work in his Westminster houses.

The book so written passed in 1921 into proof; where it was fortunate in
the friends who criticized it. Particularly it owes its thanks to Mr. and
Mrs. Bernard Shaw for countless suggestions of great value and diversity:
and for all the present semicolons.

It does not pretend to be impartial. I was fighting for my hand, upon my
own midden. Please take it as a personal narrative piece out of memory.
I could not make proper notes: indeed it would have been a breach of my
duty to the Arabs if I had picked such flowers while they fought. My
superior officers, Wilson, Joyce, Dawnay, Newcombe and Davenport could
each tell a like tale. The same is true of Stirling, Young, LIoyd and
Maynard: of Buxton and Winterton: of Ross, Stent and Siddons: of Peake,
Homby, Scott-Higgins and Garland: of Wordie, Bennett and MacIndoe: of
Bassett, Scott, Goslett, Wood and Gray: of Hinde, Spence and Bright: of
Brodie and Pascoe, Gilman and Grisenthwaite, Greenhill, Dowsett and Wade:
of Henderson, Leeson, Makins and Nunan.

And there were many other leaders or lonely fighters to whom this
self-regardant picture is not fair. It is still less fair, of course, like
all war-stories, to the un-named rank and file: who miss their share of
credit, as they must do, until they can write the despatches.

T. E. S.
Cranwell, 15.8.26





LIST OF CONTENTS


INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER
INTRODUCTION. Foundations of Revolt
BOOK ONE. The Discovery of Feisal
BOOK TWO. Opening the Arab Offensive
BOOK THREE. A Railway Diversion
BOOK FOUR. Extending to Akaba
BOOK FIVE. Marking Time
BOOK SIX. The Raid upon the Bridges
BOOK SEVEN. The Dead Sea Campaign
BOOK EIGHT. The Ruin of High Hope
BOOK NINE. Balancing for a Last Effort
BOOK TEN. The House is Perfected
EPILOGUE




INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER




The story which follows was first written out in Paris during the Peace
Conference, from notes jotted daily on the march, strengthened by some
reports sent to my chiefs in Cairo. Afterwards, in the autumn of 1919,
this first draft and some of the notes were lost. It seemed to me
historically needful to reproduce the tale, as perhaps no one but myself
in Feisal's army had thought of writing down at the time what we felt,
what we hoped, what we tried. So it was built again with heavy repugnance
in London in the winter of 1919-20 from memory and my surviving notes. The
record of events was not dulled in me and perhaps few actual mistakes
crept in--except in details of dates or numbers--but the outlines and
significance of things had lost edge in the haze of new interests.

Dates and places are correct, so far as my notes preserved them: but the
personal names are not. Since the adventure some of those who worked with
me have buried themselves in the shallow grave of public duty. Free
use has been made of their names. Others still possess themselves, and
here keep their secrecy. Sometimes one man carried various names. This may
hide individuality and make the book a scatter of featureless puppets,
rather than a group of living people: but once good is told of a man, and
again evil, and some would not thank me for either blame or praise.

This isolated picture throwing the main light upon myself is unfair to my
British colleagues. Especially I am most sorry that I have not told what
the non-commissioned of us did. They were but wonderful, especially when
it is taken into account that they had not the motive, the imaginative
vision of the end, which sustained officers. Unfortunately my concern was
limited to this end, and the book is just a designed procession of Arab
freedom from Mecca to Damascus. It is intended to rationalize the
campaign, that everyone may see how natural the success was and how
inevitable, how little dependent on direction or brain, how much less on
the outside assistance of the few British. It was an Arab war waged and
led by Arabs for an Arab aim in Arabia.

My proper share was a minor one, but because of a fluent pen, a free
speech, and a certain adroitess of brain, I took upon myself, as I
describe it, a mock primacy. In reality I never had any office among the
Arabs: was never in charge of the British mission with them. Wilson,
Joyce, Newcombe, Dawnay and Davenport were all over my head. I flattered
myself that I was too young, not that they had more heart or mind in the
work, I did my best. Wilson, Newcombe, Dawnay, Davenport, Buxton,
Marshall, Stirling, Young, Maynard, Ross, Scott, Winterton, Lloyd, Wordie,
Siddons, Goslett, Stent  Henderson, Spence, Gilman, Garland, Brodie,
Makins, Nunan, Leeson, Hornby, Peake, Scott-Higgins, Ramsay, Wood, Hinde,
Bright, MacIndoe, Greenhill, Grisenthwaite, Dowsett, Bennett, Wade, Gray,
Pascoe and the others also did their best.

It would be impertinent in me to praise them. When I wish to say ill of
one outside our number, I do it: though there is less of this than was in
my diary, since the passage of time seems to have bleached out men's
stains. When I wish to praise outsiders, I do it: bur our family affairs
are our own. We did what we set out to do, and have the satisfaction of
that knowledge. The others have liberty some day to put on record their
story, one parallel to mine but not mentioning more of me than I of them,
for each of us did his job by himself and as he pleased, hardly seeing his
friends.

In these pages the history is not of the Arab movement, but of me in it.
It is a narrative of daily life, mean happenings, little people. Here are
no lessons for the world, no disclosures to shock peoples. It is filled
with trivial things, partly that no one mistake for history the bones from
which some day a man may make history, and partly for the pleasure it gave
me to recall the fellowship of the revolt. We were fond together, because
of the sweep of the open places, the taste of wide winds, the sunlight,
and the hopes in which we worked. The moral freshness of the world-to-be
intoxicated us. We were wrought up in ideas inexpressible and vaporous,
but to be fought for. We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns,
never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned,
the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness
of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to
keep: and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked
for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made
their peace.

All men dream: but nor equally, Those who dream by night in the dusty
recesses oftheir minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but
the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream
with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did. I meant to make a new
nation, to restore! a lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites
the foundations on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their
national thoughts. So high an aim called out the inherent nobility of
their minds, and made them play a generous part in events: but when we
won, it was charged against me that the British petrol royalties in
Mesopotamia were become dubious, and French Colonial policy ruined in the
Levant.

I am afraid that I hope so. We pay for these things too much in honour and
in innocent lives. I went up the Tigris with one hundred Devon
Territorials, young, clean, delightful fellows, full of the power of
happiness and of making women and children glad. By them one saw vividly
how great it was to be their kin, and English. And we were casting them by
thousands into the fire to the worst of deaths, not to win the war but
that the corn and rice and oil of Mesopotamia might be ours. The only need
was to defeat our enemies (Turkey among them), and this was at last done
in the wisdom of Allenby with less than four hundred killed, by turning to
our uses the hands of the oppressed in Turkey. I am proudest of my thirty
fights in that I did not have any of our own blood shed. All our subject
provinces to me were not worth one dead Englishman.

We were three years over this effort and I have had to hold back many
things which may not yet be said. Even so, parts of this book will be new
to nearly all who see it, and many will look for familiar things and not
find them. Once I reported fully to my chiefs, but learnt that they were
rewarding me on my own evidence. This was not as it should be. Honours may
be necessary in a professional army, as so many emphatic mentions in
despatches, and by enlisting we had put ourselves, willingly or not, in
the position of regular soldiers.

For my work on the Arab front I had determined to accept nothing. The
Cabinet raised the Arabs to fight for us by definite promises of
self-government afterwards. Arabs believe in persons, not in institutions.
They saw in me a free agent of the British Government, and demanded from
me an endorsement of its written promises. So I had to join the
conspiracy, and, for what my word was worth, assured the men of their
reward. In our two years' partnership under fire they grew accustomed to
believing me and to think my Government, like myself, sincere. In this
hope they performed some fine things, but, of course, instead of being
proud of what we did together, I was bitterly ashamed.

It was evident from the beginning that if we won the war these promises
would be dead paper, and had I been an honest adviser of the Arabs I would
have advised them to go home and not risk their lives fighting for such
stuff: but I salved myself with the hope that, by leading these Arabs
madly in the final victory I would establish them, with arms in their
hands, in a position so assured (if not dominant) that expediency would
counsel to the Great Powers a fair settlement of their claims. In other
words, I presumed (seeing no other leader with the will and power) that I
would survive the campaigns, and be able to defeat not merely the Turks on
the battlefield, but my own country and its allies in the council-chamber.
It was an immodest presumption: it is not yet: clear if I succeeded: but
it is clear that I had no shadow of leave to engage the Arabs, unknowing,
in such hazard. I risked the fraud, on my conviction that Arab help was
necessary to our cheap and speedy victory in the East, and that better we
win and break our word than lose.

The dismissal of Sir Henry McMahon confirmed my belief in our essential
insincerity: but I could not so explain myself to General Wingate while
the war lasted, since I was nominally under his orders, and he did not
seem sensible of how false his own standing was. The only thing remaining
was to refuse rewards for being a successful trickster and, to prevent
this unpleasantness arising, I began in my reports to conceal the true
stories of things, and to persuade the few Arabs who knew to an equal
reticence. In this book also, for the last time, I mean to be my own
judge of what to say.




INTRODUCTION. Foundations of Revolt




CHAPTERS I TO VII



SOME ENGLISHMEN, OF WHOM KITCHENER WAS CHIEF, BELIEVED THAT A REBELLION
OF ARABS AGAINST TURKS WOULD ENABLE ENGLAND, WHILE FIGHTING GERMANY,
SIMULTANEOUSLY TO DEFEAT HER ALLY TURKEY.

THEIR KNOWLEDGE OF THE NATURE AND POWER AND COUNTRY OF THE
ARABIC-SPEAKING PEOPLES MADE THEM THINK THAT THE ISSUE OF SUCH A
REBELLION WOULD BE HAPPY: AND INDICATED ITS CHARACTER AND METHOD.

SO THEY ALLOWED IT TO BEGIN, HAVING OBTAINED FOR IT FORMAL ASSURANCES
OF HELP FROM THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT. YET NONE THE LESS THE REBELLION OF
THE SHERIF OF MECCA CAME TO MOST AS A SURPRISE, AND FOUND THE ALLIES
UNREADY. IT AROUSED MIXED FEELINGS AND MADE STRONG FRIENDS AND STRONG
ENEMIES, AMID WHOSE CLASHING JEALOUSIES ITS AFFAIRS BEGAN TO MISCARRY.




CHAPTER I



Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances.
For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under
the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were
dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and
shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars. We were
a self-centred army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom,
the second of man's creeds, a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all
our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded
in its glare.

As time went by our need to fight for the ideal increased to an
unquestioning possession, riding with spur and rein over our doubts.
Willy-nilly it became a faith. We had sold ourselves into its slavery,
manacled ourselves together in its chain-gang, bowed ourselves to serve
its holiness with all our good and ill content. The mentality of
ordinary human slaves is terrible--they have lost the world--and we had
surrendered, not body alone, but soul to the overmastering greed of
victory. By our own act we were drained of morality, of volition, of
responsibility, like dead leaves in the wind.

The everlasting battle stripped from us care of our own lives or of
others'. We had ropes about our necks, and on our heads prices which
showed that the enemy intended hideous tortures for us if we were
caught. Each day some of us passed; and the living knew themselves just
sentient puppets on God's stage: indeed, our taskmaster was merciless,
merciless, so long as our bruised feet could stagger forward on the
road. The weak envied those tired enough to die; for success looked so
remote, and failure a near and certain, if sharp, release from toil. We
lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in
the trough of waves of feeling. This impotency was bitter to us, and
made us live only for the seen horizon, reckless what spite we
inflicted or endured, since physical sensation showed itself meanly
transient. Gusts of cruelty, perversions, lusts ran lightly over the
surface without troubling us; for the moral laws which had seemed to
hedge about these silly accidents must be yet fainter words. We had
learned that there were pangs too sharp, griefs too deep, ecstasies too
high for our finite selves to register. When emotion reached this pitch
the mind choked; and memory went white till the circumstances were
humdrum once more.

Such exaltation of thought, while it let adrift the spirit, and gave it
licence in strange airs, lost it the old patient rule over the body.
The body was too coarse to feel the utmost of our sorrows and of our
joys. Therefore, we abandoned it as rubbish: we left it below us to
march forward, a breathing simulacrum, on its own unaided level,
subject to influences from which in normal times our instincts would
have shrunk. The men were young and sturdy; and hot flesh and blood
unconsciously claimed a right in them and tormented their bellies with
strange longings. Our privations and dangers fanned this virile heat,
in a climate as racking as can be conceived. We had no shut places to
be alone in, no thick clothes to hide our nature. Man in all things
lived candidly with man.

The Arab was by nature continent; and the use of universal marriage had
nearly abolished irregular courses in his tribes. The public women of
the rare settlements we encountered in our months of wandering would
have been nothing to our numbers, even had their raddled meat been
palatable to a man of healthy parts. In horror of such sordid commerce
our youths began indifferently to slake one another's few needs in
their own clean bodies--a cold convenience that, by comparison, seemed
sexless and even pure. Later, some began to justify this sterile
process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand
with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace, found there hidden in the
darkness a sensual co-efficient of the mental passion which was welding
our souls and spirits in one flaming effort. Several, thirsting to
punish appetites they could not wholly prevent, took a savage pride in
degrading the body, and offered themselves fiercely in any habit which
promised physical pain or filth.

I was sent to these Arabs as a stranger, unable to think their thoughts
or subscribe their beliefs, but charged by duty to lead them forward
and to develop to the highest any movement of theirs profitable to
England in her war. If I could not assume their character, I could at
least conceal my own, and pass among them without evident friction,
neither a discord nor a critic but an unnoticed influence. Since I was
their fellow, I will not be their apologist or advocate. To-day in my
old garments, I could play the bystander, obedient to the sensibilities
of our theatre . . . but it is more honest to record that these ideas
and actions then passed naturally. What now looks wanton or sadic
seemed in the field inevitable, or just unimportant routine.

Blood was always on our hands: we were licensed to it. Wounding and
killing seemed ephemeral pains, so very brief and sore was life with
us. With the sorrow of living so great, the sorrow of punishment had to
be pitiless. We lived for the day and died for it. When there was
reason and desire to punish we wrote our lesson with gun or whip
immediately in the sullen flesh of the sufferer, and the case was
beyond appeal. The desert did not afford the refined slow penalties of
courts and gaols.

Of course our rewards and pleasures were as suddenly sweeping as our
troubles; but, to me in particular, they bulked less large. Bedouin
ways were hard even for those brought up to them, and for strangers
terrible: a death in life. When the march or labour ended I had no
energy to record sensation, nor while it lasted any leisure to see the
spiritual loveliness which sometimes came upon us by the way. In my
notes, the cruel rather than the beautiful found place. We no doubt
enjoyed more the rare moments of peace and forgetfulness; but I
remember more the agony, the terrors, and the mistakes. Our life is
not summed up in what I have written (there are things not to be
repeated in cold blood for very shame); but what I have written was in
and of our life. Pray God that men reading the story will not, for love
of the glamour of strangeness, go out to prostitute themselves and
their talents in serving another race.

A man who gives himself to be a possession of aliens leads a Yahoo
life, having bartered his soul to a brute-master. He is not of them. He
may stand against them, persuade himself of a mission, batter and twist
them into something which they, of their own accord, would not have
been. Then he is exploiting his old environment to press them out of
theirs. Or, after my model, he may imitate them so well that they
spuriously imitate him back again. Then he is giving away his own
environment: pretending to theirs; and pretences are hollow, worthless
things. In neither case does he do a thing of himself, nor a thing so
clean as to be his own (without thought of conversion), letting them
take what action or reaction they please from the silent example.

In my case, the effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs,
and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self,
and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they
destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely take on
the Arab skin: it was an affectation only. Easily was a man made an
infidel, but hardly might he be converted to another faith. I had
dropped one form and not taken on the other, and was become like
Mohammed's coffin in our legend, with a resultant feeling of intense
loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they
do. Such detachment came at times to a man exhausted by prolonged
physical effort and isolation. His body plodded on mechanically, while
his reasonable mind left him, and from without looked down critically
on him, wondering what that futile lumber did and why. Sometimes these
selves would converse in the void; and then madness was very near, as I
believe it would be near the man who could see things through the veils
at once of two customs, two educations, two environments.




CHAPTER II



A first difficulty of the Arab movement was to say who the Arabs were.
Being a manufactured people, their name had been changing in sense
slowly year by year. Once it meant an Arabian. There was a country
called Arabia; but this was nothing to the point. There was a language
called Arabic; and in it lay the test. It was the current tongue of
Syria and Palestine, of Mesopotamia, and of the great peninsula called
Arabia on the map. Before the Moslem conquest, these areas were
inhabited by diverse peoples, speaking languages of the Arabic family.
We called them Semitic, but (as with most scientific terms)
incorrectly. However, Arabic, Assyrian, Babylonian, Phoenician, Hebrew,
Aramaic and Syriac were related tongues; and indications of common
influences in the past, or even of a common origin, were strengthened
by our knowledge that the appearances and customs of the present
Arabic-speaking peoples of Asia, while as varied as a field--full of
poppies, had an equal and essential likeness. We might with perfect
propriety call them cousins--and cousins certainly, if sadly, aware of
their own relationship.

The Arabic-speaking areas of Asia in this sense were a rough
parallelogram. The northern side ran from Alexandretta, on the
Mediterranean, across Mesopotamia eastward to the Tigris. The south
side was the edge of the Indian Ocean, from Aden to Muscat. On the west
it was bounded by the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, and the Red Sea to
Aden. On the east by the Tigris, and the Persian Gulf to Muscat. This
square of land, as large as India, formed the homeland of our Semites,
in which no foreign race had kept a permanent footing, though
Egyptians, Hittites, Philistines, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Turks and
Franks had variously tried. All had in the end been broken, and their
scattered elements drowned in the strong characteristics of the Semitic
race. Semites had sometimes pushed outside this area, and themselves
been drowned in the outer world. Egypt, Algiers, Morocco, Malta,
Sicily, Spain, Cilicia and France absorbed and obliterated Semitic
colonies. Only in Tripoli of Africa, and in the everlasting miracle of
Jewry, had distant Semites kept some of their identity and force.

The origin of these peoples was an academic question; but for the
understanding of their revolt their present social and political
differences were important, and could only be grasped by looking at
their geography. This continent of theirs fell into certain great
regions, whose gross physical diversities imposed varying habits on the
dwellers in them. On the west the parallelogram was framed, from
Alexandretta to Aden, by a mountain belt, called (in the north) Syria,
and thence progressively southward called Palestine, Midian, Hejaz, and
lastly Yemen. It had an average height of perhaps three thousand feet,
with peaks of ten to twelve thousand feet. It faced west, was well
watered with rain and cloud from the sea, and in general was fully
peopled.

Another range of inhabited hills, facing the Indian Ocean, was the
south edge of the parallelogram. The eastern frontier was at first an
alluvial plain called Mesopotamia, but south of Basra a level littoral,
called Kuweit, and Hasa, to Gattar. Much of this plain was peopled.
These inhabited hills and plains framed a gulf of thirsty desert, in
whose heart was an archipelago of watered and populous oases called
Kasim and Aridh. In this group of oases lay the true centre of Arabia,
the preserve of its native spirit, and its most conscious
individuality. The desert lapped it round and kept it pure of contact.

The desert which performed this great function around the oases, and so
made the character of Arabia, varied in nature. South of the oases it
appeared to be a pathless sea of sand, stretching nearly to the
populous escarpment of the Indian Ocean shore, shutting it out from
Arabian history, and from all influence on Arabian morals and politics.
Hadhramaut, as they called this southern coast, formed part of the
history of the Dutch Indies; and its thought swayed Java rather than
Arabia. To the west of the oases, between them and the Hejaz hills, was
the Nejd desert, an area of gravel and lava, with little sand in it. To
the east of these oases, between them and Kuweit, spread a similar
expanse of gravel, but with some great stretches of soft sand, making
the road difficult. To the north of the oases lay a belt of sand, and
then an immense gravel and lava plain, filling up everything between
the eastern edge of Syria and the banks of the Euphrates where
Mesopotamia began. The practicability of this northern desert for men
and motor-cars enabled the Arab revolt to win its ready success.

The hills of the west and the plains of the east were the parts of
Arabia always most populous and active. In particular on the west, the
mountains of Syria and Palestine, of Hejaz and Yemen, entered time and
again into the current of our European life. Ethically, these fertile
healthy hills were in Europe, not in Asia, just as the Arabs looked
always to the Mediterranean, not to the Indian Ocean, for their
cultural sympathies, for their enterprises, and particularly for their
expansions, since the migration problem was the greatest and most
complex force in Arabia, and general to it, however it might vary in
the different Arabic districts.

In the north (Syria) the birth rate was low in the cities and the death
rate high, because of the insanitary conditions and the hectic life led
by the majority. Consequently the surplus peasantry found openings in
the towns, and were there swallowed up. In the Lebanon, where
sanitation had been improved, a greater exodus of youth took place to
America each year, threatening (for the first time since Greek days) to
change the outlook of an entire district.

In Yemen the solution was different. There was no foreign trade, and no
massed industries to accumulate population in unhealthy places. The
towns were just market towns, as clean and simple as ordinary villages.
Therefore the population slowly increased; the scale of living was
brought down very low; and a congestion of numbers was generally felt.
They could not emigrate overseas; for the Sudan was even worse country
than Arabia, and the few tribes which did venture across were compelled
to modify their manner of life and their Semitic culture profoundly, in
order to exist. They could not move northward along the hills; for
these were barred by the holy town of Mecca and its port Jidda: an
alien belt, continually reinforced by strangers from India and Java and
Bokhara and Africa, very strong in vitality, violently hostile to the
Semitic consciousness, and maintained despite economics and geography
and climate by the artificial factor of a world-religion. The
congestion of Yemen, therefore, becoming extreme, found its only relief
in the east, by forcing the weaker aggregations of its border down and
down the slopes of the hills along the Widian, the half-waste district
of the great water-bearing valleys of Bisha, Dawasir, Ranya and Taraba,
which ran out towards the deserts of Nejd. These weaker clans had
continually to exchange good springs and fertile palms for poorer
springs and scantier palms, till at last they reached an area where a
proper agricultural life became impossible. They then began to eke out
their precarious husbandry by breeding sheep and camels, and in time
came to depend more and more on these herds for their living.

Finally, under a last impulse from the straining population behind
them, the border people (now almost wholly pastoral), were flung out of
the furthest crazy oasis into the untrodden wilderness as nomads. This
process, to be watched to-day with individual families and tribes to
whose marches an exact name and date might be put, must have been going
on since the first day of full settlement of Yemen. The Widian below
Mecca and Taif are crowded with the memories and place-names of half a
hundred tribes which have gone from there, and may be found to-day in
Nejd, in Jebel Sham-mar, in the Hamad, even on the frontiers of Syria
and Mesopotamia. There was the source of migration, the factory of
nomads, the springing of the gulf-stream of desert wanderers.

For the people of the desert were as little static as the people of the
hills. The economic life of the desert was based on the supply of
camels, which were best bred on the rigorous upland pastures with their
strong nutritive thorns. By this industry the Bedouins lived; and it in
turn moulded their life, apportioned the tribal areas, and kept the
clans revolving through their rote of spring, summer and winter
pasturages, as the herds cropped the scanty growths of each in turn.
The camel markets in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt determined the
population which the deserts could support, and regulated strictly
their standard of living. So the desert likewise overpeopled itself
upon occasion; and then there were heavings and thrustings of the
crowded tribes as they elbowed themselves by natural courses towards
the light. They might not go south towards the inhospitable sand or
sea. They could not turn west; for there the steep hills of Hejaz were
thickly lined by mountain peoples taking full advantage of their
defensiveness. Sometimes they went towards the central oases of Aridh
and Kasim, and, if the tribes looking for new homes were strong and
vigorous, might succeed in occupying parts of them. If, however, the
desert had not this strength, its peoples were pushed gradually north,
up between Medina of the Hejaz and Kasim of Nejd, till they found
themselves at the fork of two roads. They could strike eastward, by
Wadi Rumh or Jebel Sham-mar, to follow eventually the Batn to Shamiya,
where they would become riverine Arabs of the Lower Euphrates; or they
could climb, by slow degrees, the ladder of western oases--Henakiya,
Kheibar, Teima, Jauf, and the Sirhan--till fate saw them nearing Jebel
Druse, in Syria, or watering their herds about Tadmor of the northern
desert, on their way to Aleppo or Assyria.

Nor then did the pressure cease: the inexorable trend northward
continued. The tribes found themselves driven to the very edge of
cultivation in Syria or Mesopotamia. Opportunity and their bellies
persuaded them of the advantages of possessing goats, and then of
possessing sheep; and lastly they began to sow, if only a little barley
for their animals. They were now no longer Bedouin, and began to suffer
like the villagers from the ravages of the nomads behind. Insensibly,
they made common cause with the peasants already on the soil, and found
out that they, too, were peasantry. So we see clans, born in the
highlands of Yemen, thrust by stronger clans into the desert, where,
unwillingly, they became nomad to keep themselves alive. We see them
wandering, every year moving a little further north or a little further
east as chance has sent them down one or other of the well-roads of the
wilderness, till finally this pressure drives them from the desert
again into the sown, with the like unwillingness of their first
shrinking experiment in nomad life. This was the circulation which kept
vigour in the Semitic body. There were few, if indeed there was a
single northern Semite, whose ancestors had not at some dark age passed
through the desert. The mark of nomadism, that most deep and biting
social discipline, was on each of them in his degree.




CHAPTER III



If tribesman and townsman in Arabic-speaking Asia were not different
races, but just men in different social and economic stages, a family
resemblance might be expected in the working of their minds, and so it
was only reasonable that common elements should appear in the product
of all these peoples. In the very outset, at the first meeting with
them, was found a universal clearness or hardness of belief, almost
mathematical in its limitation, and repellent in its unsympathetic
form. Semites had no half-tones in their register of vision. They were
a people of primary colours, or rather of black and white, who saw the
world always in contour. They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt,
our modern crown of thorns. They did not understand our metaphysical
difficulties, our introspective questionings. They knew only truth and
untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer
shades.

This people was black and white, not only in vision, but by inmost
furnishing: black and white not merely in clarity, but in apposition.
Their thoughts were at ease only in extremes. They inhabited
superlatives by choice. Sometimes inconsistents seemed to possess them
at once in joint sway; but they never compromised: they pursued the
logic of several incompatible opinions to absurd ends, without
perceiving the incongruity. With cool head and tranquil judgement,
imperturbably unconscious of the flight, they oscillated from asymptote
to asymptote.

They were a limited, narrow-minded people, whose inert intellects lay
fallow in incurious resignation. Their imaginations were vivid, but not
creative. There was so little Arab art in Asia that they could almost
be said to have had no art, though their classes were liberal patrons,
and had encouraged whatever talents in architecture, or ceramics, or
other handicraft their neighbours and helots displayed. Nor did they
handle great industries: they had no organizations of mind or body.
They invented no systems of philosophy, no complex mythologies. They
steered their course between the idols of the tribe and of the cave.
The least morbid of peoples, they had accepted the gift of Me
unquestioningly, as axiomatic. To them it was a thing inevitable,
entailed on man, a usufruct, beyond control. Suicide was a thing
impossible, and death no grief.

They were a people of spasms, of upheavals, of ideas, the race of the
individual genius. Their movements were the more shocking by contrast
with the quietude of every day, their great men greater by contrast
with the humanity of their mob. Their convictions were by instinct,
their activities intuitional. Their largest manufacture was of creeds:
almost they were monopolists of revealed religions. Three of these
efforts had endured among them: two of the three had also borne export
(in modified forms) to non-Semitic peoples. Christianity, translated
into the diverse spirits of Greek and Latin and Teutonic tongues, had
conquered Europe and America. Islam in various transformations was
subjecting Africa and parts of Asia. These were Semitic successes.
Their failures they kept to themselves. The fringes of their deserts
were strewn with broken faiths.

It was significant that this wrack of fallen religions lay about the
meeting of the desert and the sown. It pointed to the generation of all
these creeds. They were assertions, not arguments; so they required a
prophet to set them forth. The Arabs said there had been forty thousand
prophets: we had record of at least some hundreds. None of them had
been of the wilderness; but their lives were after a pattern. Their
birth set them in crowded places. An unintelligible passionate yearning
drove them out into the desert. There they lived a greater or lesser
time in meditation and physical abandonment; and thence they returned
with their imagined message articulate, to preach it to their old, and
now doubting, associates. The founders of the three great creeds
fulfilled this cycle: their possible coincidence was proved a law by
the parallel life-histories of the myriad others, the unfortunate who
failed, whom we might judge of no less true profession, but for whom
time and disillusion had not heaped up dry souls ready to be set on
fire. To the thinkers of the town the impulse into Nitria had ever been
irresistible, not probably that they found God dwelling there, but that
in its solitude they heard more certainly the living word they brought
with them.

The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the
ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from
matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the
atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert
pitilessly. A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of
rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out
over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period
which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a
desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have
been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the
precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like
dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, 'This is jessamine,
this violet, this rose'.

But at last Dahoum drew me: 'Come and smell the very sweetest scent of
all', and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets
of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the
effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That
slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and
had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its
first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it
seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. 'This,' they told
me, 'is the best: it has no taste.' My Arabs were turning their backs
on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had
no share or part.

The Beduin of the desert, born and grown up in it, had embraced with
all his soul this nakedness too harsh for volunteers, for the reason,
felt but inarticulate, that there he found himself indubitably free. He
lost material ties, comforts, all superfluities and other complications
to achieve a personal liberty which haunted starvation and death. He
saw no virtue in poverty herself: he enjoyed the little vices and
luxuries--coffee, fresh water, women--which he could still preserve. In
his life he had air and winds, sun and light, open spaces and a great
emptiness. There was no human effort, no fecundity in Nature: just the
heaven above and the unspotted earth beneath. There unconsciously he
came near God. God was to him not anthropomorphic, not tangible, not
moral nor ethical, not concerned with the world or with him, not
natural: but the being [GREEK] thus qualified not by divestiture but by
investiture, a comprehending Being, the egg of all activity, with
nature and matter just a glass reflecting Him.

The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he
was within God. He could not conceive anything which was or was not
God, Who alone was great; yet there was a homeliness, an everyday-ness
of this climatic Arab God, who was their eating and their fighting and
their lusting, the commonest of their thoughts, their familiar resource
and companion, in a way impossible to those whose God is so wistfully
veiled from them by despair of their carnal unworthiness of Him and by
the decorum of formal worship. Arabs felt no incongruity in bringing
God into the weaknesses and appetites of their least creditable causes.
He was the most familiar of their words; and indeed we lost much
eloquence when making Him the shortest and ugliest of our
monosyllables.

This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in
thought. It was easily felt as an influence, and those who went into
the desert long enough to forget its open spaces and its emptiness were
inevitably thrust upon God as the only refuge and rhythm of being. The
Bedawi might be a nominal Sunni, or a nominal Wahabi, or anything else
in the Semitic compass, and he would take it very lightly, a little in
the manner of the watchmen at Zion's gate who drank beer and laughed in
Zion because they were Zionists. Each individual nomad had his revealed
religion, not oral or traditional or expressed, but instinctive in
himself; and so we got all the Semitic creeds with (in character and
essence) a stress on the emptiness of the world and the fullness of
God; and according to the power and opportunity of the believer was the
expression of them.

The desert dweller could not take credit for his belief. He had never
been either evangelist or proselyte. He arrived at this intense
condensation of himself in God by shutting his eyes to the world, and
to all the complex possibilities latent in him which only contact with
wealth and temptations could bring forth. He attained a sure trust and
a powerful trust, but of how narrow a field! His sterile experience
robbed him of compassion and perverted his human kindness to the image
of the waste in which he hid. Accordingly he hurt himself, not merely
to be free, but to please himself. There followed a delight in pain, a
cruelty which was more to him than goods. The desert Arab found no joy
like the joy of voluntarily holding back. He found luxury in
abnegation, renunciation, self restraint. He made nakedness of the mind
as sensuous as nakedness of the body. He saved his own soul, perhaps,
and without danger, but in a hard selfishness. His desert was made a
spiritual ice-house, in which was preserved intact but unimproved for
all ages a vision of the unity of God. To it sometimes the seekers from
the outer world could escape for a season and look thence in detachment
at the nature of the generation they would convert.

This faith of the desert was impossible in the towns. It was at once
too strange, too simple, too impalpable for export and common use. The
idea, the ground-belief of all Semitic creeds was waiting there, but it
had to be diluted to be made comprehensible to us. The scream of a bat
was too shrill for many ears: the desert spirit escaped through our
coarser texture. The prophets returned from the desert with their
glimpse of God, and through their stained medium (as through a dark
glass) showed something of the majesty and brilliance whose full vision
would blind, deafen, silence us, serve us as it had served the Beduin,
setting him uncouth, a man apart.

The disciples, in the endeavour to strip themselves and their
neighbours of all things according to the Master's word, stumbled over
human weaknesses and failed. To live, the villager or townsman must
fill himself each day with the pleasures of acquisition and
accumulation, and by rebound off circumstance become the grossest and
most material of men. The shining contempt of life which led others
into the barest asceticism drove him to despair. He squandered himself
heedlessly, as a spendthrift: ran through his inheritance of flesh in
hasty longing for the end. The Jew in the Metropole at Brighton, the
miser, the worshipper of Adonis, the lecher in the stews of Damascus
were alike signs of the Semitic capacity for enjoyment, and expressions
of the same nerve which gave us at the other pole the self-denial of
the Essenes, or the early Christians, or the first Khalifas, finding
the way to heaven fairest for the poor in spirit. The Semite hovered
between lust and self-denial.

Arabs could be swung on an idea as on a cord; for the unpledged
allegiance of their minds made them obedient servants. None of them
would escape the bond till success had come, and with it responsibility
and duty and engagements. Then the idea was gone and the work ended--in
ruins. Without a creed they could be taken to the four corners of the
world (but not to heaven) by being shown the riches of earth and the
pleasures of it; but if on the road, led in this fashion, they met the
prophet of an idea, who had nowhere to lay his head and who depended
for his food on charity or birds, then they would all leave their
wealth for his inspiration. They were incorrigibly children of the
idea, feckless and colour-blind, to whom body and spirit were for ever
and inevitably opposed. Their mind was strange and dark, full of
depressions and exaltations, lacking in rule, but with more of ardour
and more fertile in belief than any other in the world. They were a
people of starts, for whom the abstract was the strongest motive, the
process of infinite courage and variety, and the end nothing. They were
as unstable as water, and like water would perhaps finally prevail.
Since the dawn of life, in successive waves they had been dashing
themselves against the coasts of flesh. Each wave was broken, but, like
the sea, wore away ever so little of the granite on which it failed,
and some day, ages yet, might roll unchecked over the place where the
material world had been, and God would move upon the face of those
waters. One such wave (and not the least) I raised and rolled before
the breath of an idea, till it reached its crest, and toppled over and
fell at Damascus. The wash of that wave, thrown back by the resistance
of vested things, will provide the matter of the following wave, when
in fullness of time the sea shall be raised once more.




CHAPTER IV



The first great rush round the Mediterranean had shown the world the
power of an excited Arab for a short spell of intense physical
activity; but when the effort burned out the lack of endurance and
routine in the Semitic mind became as evident. The provinces they had
overrun they neglected, out of sheer distaste of system, and had to
seek the help of their conquered subjects, or of more vigorous
foreigners, to administer their ill-knit and inchoate empires. So,
early in the Middle Ages, the Turks found a footing in the Arab States,
first as servants, then as helpers, and then as a parasite growth which
choked the life out of the old body politic. The last phase was of
enmity, when the Hulagus or Timurs sated their blood lust, burning and
destroying everything which irked them with a pretension of
superiority.

Arab civilizations had been of an abstract nature, moral and
intellectual rather than applied; and their lack of public spirit made
their excellent private qualities futile. They were fortunate in their
epoch: Europe had fallen barbarous; and the memory of Greek and Latin
learning was fading from men's minds. By contrast the imitative
exercise of the Arabs seemed cultured, their mental activity
progressive, their state prosperous. They had performed real service in
preserving something of a classical past for a mediaeval future.

With the coming of the Turks this happiness became a dream. By stages
the Semites of Asia passed under their yoke, and found it a slow death.
Their goods were stripped from them; and their spirits shrivelled in
the numbing breath of a military Government. Turkish rule was gendarme
rule, and Turkish political theory as crude as its practice. The Turks
taught the Arabs that the interests of a sect were higher than those of
patriotism: that the petty concerns of the province were more than
nationality. They led them by subtle dissensions to distrust one
another. Even the Arabic language was banished from courts and offices,
from the Government service, and from superior schools. Arabs might
only serve the State by sacrifice of their racial characteristics.
These measures were not accepted quietly. Semitic tenacity showed
itself in the many rebellions of Syria, Mesopotamia and Arabia against
the grosser forms of Turkish penetration; and resistance was also made
to the more insidious attempts at absorption. The Arabs would not give
up their rich and flexible tongue for crude Turkish: instead, they
filled Turkish with Arabic words, and held to the treasures of their
own literature.

They lost their geographical sense, and their racial and political and
historical memories; but they clung the more tightly to their language,
and erected it almost into a fatherland of its own. The first duty of
every Moslem was to study the Koran, the sacred book of Islam, and
incidentally the greatest Arab literary monument. The knowledge that
this religion was his own, and that only he was perfectly qualified to
understand and practise it, gave every Arab a standard by which to
judge the banal achievements of the Turk.

Then came the Turkish revolution, the fall of Abdul Hamid, and the
supremacy of the Young Turks. The horizon momentarily broadened for the
Arabs. The Young-Turk movement was a revolt against the hierarchic
conception of Islam and the pan-Islamic theories of the old Sultan, who
had aspired, by making himself spiritual director of the Moslem world,
to be also (beyond appeal) its director in temporal affairs. These
young politicians rebelled and threw him into prison, under the impulse
of constitutional theories of a sovereign state. So, at a time when
Western Europe was just beginning to climb out of nationality into
internationality, and to rumble with wars far removed from problems of
race, Western Asia began to climb out of Catholicism into nationalist
politics, and to dream of wars for self-government and self-sovereignty,
instead of for faith or dogma. This tendency had broken out first
and most strongly in the Near East, in the little Balkan States,
and had sustained them through an almost unparalleled martyrdom
to their goal of separation from Turkey. Later there had been
nationalist movements in Egypt, in India, in Persia, and finally in
Constantinople, where they were fortified and made pointed by the new
American ideas in education: ideas which, when released in the old high
Oriental atmosphere, made an explosive mixture. The American schools,
teaching by the method of inquiry, encouraged scientific detachment and
free exchange of views. Quite without intention they taught revolution,
since it was impossible for an individual to be modern in Turkey and at
the same time loyal, if he had been born of one of the subject
races--Greeks, Arabs, Kurds, Armenians or Albanians--over whom the
Turks were so long helped to keep dominion.

The Young Turks, in the confidence of their first success, were carried
away by the logic of their principles, and as protest against Pan-Islam
preached Ottoman brotherhood. The gullible subject races--far more
numerous than the Turks themselves--believed that they were called upon
to co-operate in building a new East. Rushing to die task (full of
Herbert Spencer and Alexander Hamilton) they laid down platforms of
sweeping ideas, and hailed the Turks as partners. The Turks, terrified
at the forces they had let loose, drew the fires as suddenly as they
had stoked them. Turkey made Turkish for the Turks--YENI-TURAN--became
the cry. Later on, this policy would turn them towards the rescue of
their irredenti--the Turkish populations subject to Russia in Central
Asia; but, first of all, they must purge their Empire of such
irritating subject races as resisted the ruling stamp. The Arabs, the
largest alien component of Turkey, must first be dealt with.
Accordingly the Arab deputies were scattered, the Arab societies
forbidden, the Arab notables proscribed. Arabic manifestations and the
Arabic language were suppressed by Enver Pasha more sternly than by
Abdul Hamid before him.

However, the Arabs had tasted freedom: they could not change their
ideas as quickly as their conduct; and the staffer spirits among them
were not easily to be put down. They read the Turkish papers, putting
'Arab' for Turk' in the patriotic exhortations. Suppression charged
them with unhealthy violence. Deprived of constitutional outlets they
became revolutionary. The Arab societies went underground, and changed
from liberal clubs into conspiracies. The Akhua, the Arab mother
society, was publicly dissolved. It was replaced in Mesopotamia by the
dangerous Ahad, a very secret brotherhood, limited almost entirely to
Arab officers in the Turkish Army, who swore to acquire the military
knowledge of their masters, and to turn it against them, in the service
of the Arab people, when the moment of rebellion came.

It was a large society, with a sure base in the wild part of Southern
Irak, where Sayid Taleb, the young John Wilkes of the Arab movement,
held the power in his unprincipled fingers. To it belonged seven out of
every ten Mesopotamian-born officers; and their counsel was so well
kept that members of it held high command in Turkey to the last. When
the crash came, and Allenby rode across Armageddon and Turkey fell, one
vice-president of the society was commanding the broken fragments of
the Palestine armies on the retreat, and another was directing the
Turkish forces across-Jordan in the Amman area. Yet later, after the
armistice, great places in the Turkish service were still held by men
ready to turn on their masters at a word from their Arab leaders. To
most of them the word was never given; for those societies were pro-Arab
only, willing to fight for nothing but Arab independence; and they
could see no advantage in supporting the Allies rather than the Turks,
since they did not believe our assurances that we would leave them
free. Indeed, many of them preferred an Arabia united by Turkey in
miserable subjection, to an Arabia divided up and slothful under the
easier control of several European powers in spheres of influence.

Greater than the Ahad was the Fetah, the society of freedom in Syria.
The landowners, the writers, the doctors, the great public servants
linked themselves in this society with a common oath, passwords, signs,
a press and a central treasury, to ruin the Turkish Empire. With the
noisy facility of the Syrian--an ape-like people having much of the
Japanese quickness, but shallow--they speedily built up a formidable
organization. They looked outside for help, and expected freedom to
come by entreaty, not by sacrifice. They corresponded with Egypt, with
the Ahad (whose members, with true Mesopotamian dourness, rather
despised them), with the Sherif of Mecca, and with Great Britain:
everywhere seeking the ally to serve their turn. They also were deadly
secret; and the Government, though it suspected their existence, could
find no credible evidence of their leaders or membership. It had to
hold its hand until it could strike with evidence enough to satisfy the
English and French diplomats who acted as modern public opinion in
Turkey. The war in 1914 withdrew these agents, and left the Turkish
Government free to strike.

Mobilization put all power into the hands of those members--Enver,
Talaat and Jemal--who were at once the most ruthless, the most logical,
and the most ambitious of the Young Turks. They set themselves to stamp
out all non-Turkish currents in the State, especially Arab and Armenian
nationalism. For the first step they found a specious and convenient
weapon in the secret papers of a French Consul in Syria, who left
behind him in his Consulate copies of correspondence (about Arab
freedom) which had passed between him and an Arab club, not connected
with the Fetah but made up of the more talkative and less formidable
INTELLIGENZIA of the Syrian coast. The Turks, of course, were
delighted; for 'colonial' aggression in North Africa had given the
French a black reputation in the Arabic-speaking Moslem world; and it
served Jemal well to show his co-religionists that these Arab
nationalists were infidel enough to prefer France to Turkey.

In Syria, of course, his disclosures had little novelty; but the
members of the society were known and respected, if somewhat academic,
persons; and their arrest and condemnation, and the crop of
deportations, exiles, and executions to which their trial led, moved
the country to its depths, and taught the Arabs of the Fetah that if
they did not profit by their lesson, the fate of the Armenians would be
upon them. The Armenians had been well armed and organized; but their
leaders had failed them. They had been disarmed and destroyed
piecemeal, the men by massacre, the women and children by being driven
and overdriven along the wintry roads into the desert, naked and
hungry, the common prey of any passer-by, until death took them. The
Young Turks had killed the Armenians, not because they were Christians,
but because they were Armenians; and for the same reason they herded
Arab Moslems and Arab Christians into the same prison, and hanged them
together on the same scaffold. Jemal Pasha united all classes,
conditions and creeds in Syria, under pressure of a common misery and
peril, and so made a concerted revolt possible.

The Turks suspected the Arab officers and soldiers in the Army, and
hoped to use against them the scattering tactics which had served
against the Armenians. At first transport difficulties stood in their
way; and there came a dangerous concentration of Arab divisions (nearly
one third of the original Turkish Army was Arabic speaking) in North
Syria early in 1915. They broke these up when possible, marching them
off to Europe, to the Dardanelles, to the Caucasus, or the
Canal--anywhere, so long as they were put quickly into the firing-line,
or withdrawn far from the sight and help of their compatriots. A Holy War
was proclaimed to give the 'Union and Progress' banner something of the
traditional sanctity of the Caliph's battle-order in the eyes of the
old clerical elements; and the Sherif of Mecca was invited--or rather
ordered--to echo the cry.




CHAPTER V



The position of the Sherif of Mecca had long been anomalous. The title
of 'Sherif implied descent from the prophet Mohammed through his
daughter Fatima, and Hassan, her elder son. Authentic Sherifs were
inscribed on the family tree--an immense roll preserved at Mecca, in
custody of the Emir of Mecca, the elected Sherif of Sherifs, supposed
to be the senior and noblest of all. The prophet's family had held
temporal rule in Mecca for the last nine hundred years, and counted
some two thousand persons.

The old Ottoman Governments regarded this clan of manticratic peers
with a mixture of reverence and distrust. Since they were too strong to
be destroyed, the Sultan salved his dignity by solemnly confirming
their Emir in place. This empty approval acquired dignity by lapse of
time, until the new holder began to feel that it added a final seal to
his election. At last the Turks found that they needed the Hejaz under
their unquestioned sway as part of the stage furniture for their new
pan-Islamic notion. The fortuitous opening of the Suez Canal enabled
them to garrison the Holy Cities. They projected the Hejaz Railway, and
increased Turkish influence among the tribes by money, intrigue, and
armed expeditions.

As the Sultan grew stronger there he ventured to assert himself more
and more alongside the Sherif, even in Mecca itself, and upon occasion
ventured to depose a Sherif too magnificent for his views, and to
appoint a successor from a rival family of the clan in hopes of winning
the usual advantages from dissension. Finally, Abdul Hamid took away
some of the family to Constantinople into honourable captivity. Amongst
these was Hussein ibn Ali, the future ruler, who was held a prisoner
for nearly eighteen years. He took the opportunity to provide his
sons--Ali, Abdulla, Feisal, and Zeid--with the modern education and
experience which afterwards enabled them to lead the Arab armies to
success.

When Abdul Hamid fell, the less wily Young Turks reversed his policy
and sent back Sherif Hussein to Mecca as Emir. He at once set to work
unobtrusively to restore the power of the Emirate, and strengthened
himself on the old basis, keeping the while close and friendly touch
with Constantinople through his sons Abdulla, vice-chairman of the
Turkish House, and Feisal, member for Jidda. They kept him informed of
political opinion in the capital until war broke out, when they
returned in haste to Mecca.

The outbreak of war made trouble in the Hejaz. The pilgrimage ceased,
and with it the revenues and business of the Holy Cities. There was
reason to fear that the Indian food-ships would cease to come (since
the Sherif became technically an enemy subject); and as the province
produced almost no food of its own, it would be precariously dependent
on the goodwill of the Turks, who might starve it by closing the Hejaz
Railway. Hussein had never been entirely at the Turks' mercy before;
and at this unhappy moment they particularly needed his adherence to
their 'Jehad', the Holy War of all Moslems against Christianity.

To become popularly effective this must be endorsed by Mecca; and if
endorsed it might plunge the East in blood. Hussein was honourable,
shrewd, obstinate and deeply pious. He felt that the Holy War was
doctrinally incompatible with an aggressive war, and absurd with a
Christian ally: Germany. So he refused the Turkish demand, and made at
the same time a dignified appeal to the Allies not to starve his
province for what was in no way his people's fault. The Turks in reply
at once instituted a partial blockade of the Hejaz by controlling the
traffic on the pilgrim railway. The British left his coast open to
specially-regulated food vessels.

The Turkish demand was, however, not the only one which the Sherif
received. In January 1915, Yisin, head of the Mesopotamian officers,
Ali Riza, head of the Damascus officers, and Abd el Ghani el Areisi,
for the Syrian civilians, sent down to him a concrete proposal for a
military mutiny in Syria against the Turks. The oppressed people of
Mesopotamia and Syria, the committees of the Ahad and the Fetah, were
calling out to him as the Father of the Arabs, the Moslem of Moslems,
their greatest prince, their oldest notable, to save them from the
sinister designs of Talaat and Jemal.

Hussein, as politician, as prince, as moslem, as modernist, and as
nationalist, was forced to listen to their appeal. He sent Feisal, his
third son, to Damascus, to discuss their projects as his
representative, and to make a report. He sent Ali, his eldest son, to
Medina, with orders to raise quietly, on any excuse he pleased, troops
from villagers and tribesmen of the Hejaz, and to hold them ready for
action if Feisal called. Abdulla, his politic second son, was to sound
the British by letter, to learn what would be their attitude towards a
possible Arab revolt against Turkey.

Feisal reported in January 1915, that local conditions were good, but
that the general war was not going well for their hopes. In Damascus
were three divisions of Arab troops ready for rebellion. In Aleppo two
other divisions, riddled with Arab nationalism, were sure to join in if
the others began. There was only one Turkish division this side of the
Taurus, so that it was certain that the rebels would get possession of
Syria at the first effort. On the other hand, public opinion was less
ready for extreme measures, and the military class quite sure that
Germany would win the war and win it soon. If, however, the Allies
landed their Australian Expedition (preparing in Egypt) at
Alexandretta, and so covered the Syrian flank, then it would be wise
and safe to risk a final German victory and the need to make a previous
separate peace with the Turks.

Delay followed, as the Allies went to the Dardanelles, and not to
Alexandretta. Feisal went after them to get first-hand knowledge of
Gallipoli conditions, since a breakdown of Turkey would be the Arab
signal. Then followed stagnation through the months of the Dardanelles
campaign. In that slaughter-house the remaining Ottoman first-line army
was destroyed. The disaster to Turkey of the accumulated losses was so
great that Feisal came back to Syria, judging it a possible moment in
which to strike, but found that meanwhile the local situation had
become unfavourable.

His Syrian supporters were under arrest or in hiding, and their friends
being hanged in scores on political charges. He found the well-disposed
Arab divisions either exiled to distant fronts, or broken up in drafts
and distributed among Turkish units. The Arab peasantry were in the
grip of Turkish military service, and Syria prostrate before the
merciless Jemal Pasha. His assets had disappeared. He wrote to his
father counselling further delay, till England should be ready and
Turkey in extremities. Unfortunately, England was in a deplorable
condition. Her forces were falling back shattered from the Dardanelles.
The slow-drawn agony of Kut was in its last stage; and the Senussi
rising, coincident with the entry of Bulgaria, threatened her on new
flanks.

Feisal's position was hazardous in the extreme. He was at the mercy of
the members of the secret society, whose president he had been before
the war. He had to live as the guest of Jemal Pasha, in Damascus,
rubbing up his military knowledge; for his brother Ali was raising the
troops in Hejaz on the pretext that he and Feisal would lead them
against the Suez Canal to help the Turks. So Feisal, as a good Ottoman
and officer in the Turkish service, had to live at headquarters, and
endure acquiescingly the insults and indignities heaped upon his race
by the bully Jemal in his cups.

Jemal would send for Feisal and take him to the hanging of his Syrian
friends. These victims of justice dared not show that they knew
Feisal's real hopes, any more than he dared show his mind by word or
look, since disclosure would have condemned his family and perhaps
their race to the same fate. Only once did he burst out that these
executions would cost Jemal all that he was trying to avoid; and it
took the intercessions of his Constantinople friends, chief men in
Turkey, to save him from the price of these rash words.

Feisal's correspondence with his father was an adventure in itself.
They communicated by means of old retainers of the family, men above
suspicion, who went up and down the Hejaz Railway, carrying letters in
sword-hilts, in cakes, sewn between the soles of sandals, or in
invisible writings on the wrappers of harmless packages. In all of them
Feisal reported unfavourable things, and begged his father to postpone
action till a wiser time.

Hussein, however, was not a whit cast down by Emir Feisal's
discouragements. The Young Turks in his eyes were so many godless
transgressors of their creed and their human duty--traitors to the
spirit of the time, and to the higher interests of Islam. Though an old
man of sixty-five, he was cheerfully determined to wage war against
them, relying upon justice to cover the cost. Hussein trusted so much
in God that he let his military sense lie fallow, and thought Hejaz
able to fight it out with Turkey on a fair field. So he sent Abd el
Kader el Abdu to Feisal with a letter that all was now ready for
inspection by him in Medina before the troops started for the front
Feisal informed Jemal, and asked leave to go down, but, to his dismay,
Jemal replied that Enver Pasha, the Generalissimo, was on his way to
the province, and that they would visit Medina together and inspect
them. Feisal had planned to raise his father's crimson banner as soon
as he arrived in Medina, and so to take the Turks unawares; and here he
was going to be saddled with two uninvited guests to whom, by the Arab
law of hospitality, he could do no harm, and who would probably delay
his action so long that the whole secret of the revolt would be in
jeopardy!

In the end matters passed off well, though the irony of the review was
terrible. Enver, Jemal and Feisal watched the troops wheeling and
turning in the dusty plain outside the city gate, rushing up and down
in mimic camel-battle, or spurring their horses in the javelin game
after immemorial Arab fashion. 'And are all these volunteers for the
Holy War?' asked Enver at last, turning to Feisal. 'Yes,' said Feisal.
Willing to fight to the death against the enemies of the faithful?'
Yes,' said Feisal again; and then the Arab chiefs came up to be
presented, and Sherif Ali ibn el Hussein, of Modhig, drew him aside
whispering, 'My Lord, shall we kill them now?' and Feisal said, 'No,
they are our guests.'

The sheikhs protested further; for they believed that so they could
finish off the war in two blows. They were determined to force Feisal's
hand; and he had to go among them, just out of earshot but in full
view, and plead for the lives of the Turkish dictators, who had
murdered his best friends on the scaffold. In the end he had to make
excuses, take the party back quickly to Medina, picket the banqueting
hall with his own slaves, and escort Enver and Jemal back to Damascus
to save them from death on the way. He explained this laboured courtesy
by the plea that it was the Arab manner to devote everything to guests;
but Enver and Jemal being deeply suspicious of what they had seen,
imposed a strict blockade of the Hejaz, and ordered large Turkish
reinforcements thither. They wanted to detain Feisal in Damascus; but
telegrams came from Medina claiming his immediate return to prevent
disorder, and, reluctantly, Jemal let him go on condition that his
suite remained behind as hostages.

Feisal found Medina full of Turkish troops, with the staff and
headquarters of the Twelfth Army Corps under Fakhri Pasha, the
courageous old butcher who had bloodily 'purified' Zeitun and Urfa of
Armenians. Clearly the Turks had taken warning, and Feisal's hope of a
surprise rush, winning success almost without a shot, had become
impossible. However, it was too late for prudence. From Damascus four
days later his suite took horse and rode out east into the desert to
take refuge with Nuri Shaalan, the Beduin chieftain; and the same day
Feisal showed his hand. When he raised the Arab flag, the pan-Islamic
supra-national State, for which Abdul Hamid had massacred and worked
and died, and the German hope of the co-operation of Islam in the
world-plans of the Kaiser, passed into the realm of dreams. By the mere
fact of his rebellion the Sherif had closed these two fantastic
chapters of history.

Rebellion was the gravest step which political men could take, and the
success or failure of the Arab revolt was a gamble too hazardous for
prophecy. Yet, for once, fortune favoured the bold player, and the Arab
epic tossed up its stormy road from birth through weakness, pain and
doubt, to red victory. It was the just end to an adventure which had
dared so much, but after the victory there came a slow time of
disillusion, and then a night in which the fighting men found that all
their hopes had failed them. Now, at last, may there have come to them
the white peace of the end, in the knowledge that they achieved a
deathless thing, a lucent inspiration to the children of their race.




CHAPTER VI



I had been many years going up and down the Semitic East before the
war, learning the manners of the villagers and tribesmen and citizens
of Syria and Mesopotamia. My poverty had constrained me to mix with the
humbler classes, those seldom met by European travellers, and thus my
experiences gave me an unusual angle of view, which enabled me to
understand and think for the ignorant many as well as for the more
enlightened whose rare opinions mattered, not so much for the day, as
for the morrow. In addition, I had seen something of the political
forces working in the minds of the Middle East, and especially had
noted everywhere sure signs of the decay of imperial Turkey.

Turkey was dying of overstrain, of the attempt, with diminished
resources, to hold, on traditional terms, the whole Empire bequeathed
to it. The sword had been the virtue of the children of Othman, and
swords had passed out of fashion nowadays, in favour of deadlier and
more scientific weapons. Life was growing too complicated for this
child-like people, whose strength had lain in simplicity, and patience,
and in their capacity for sacrifice. They were the slowest of the races
of Western Asia, little fitted to adapt themselves to new sciences of
government and life, still less to invent any new arts for themselves.
Their administration had become perforce an affair of files and
telegrams, of high finance, eugenics, calculations. Inevitably the old
governors, who had governed by force of hand or force of character,
illiterate, direct, personal, had to pass away. The rule was
transferred to new men, with agility and suppleness to stoop to
machinery. The shallow and half-polished committee of the Young Turks
were descendants of Greeks, Albanians, Circassians, Bulgars, Armenians,
Jews--anything but Seljuks or Ottomans. The commons ceased to feel in
tune with their governors, whose culture was Levantine, and whose
political theory was French. Turkey was decaying; and only the knife
might keep health in her.

Loving the old ways steadily, the Anatolian remained a beast of burden
in his village and an uncomplaining soldier abroad, while the subject
races of the Empire, who formed nearly seven-tenths of its total
population, grew daily in strength and knowledge; for their lack of
tradition and responsibility, as well as their lighter and quicker
minds, disposed them to accept new ideas. The former natural awe and
supremacy of the Turkish name began to fade in the face of wider
comparison. This changing balance of Turkey and the subject provinces
involved growing garrisons if the old ground was to be retained.
Tripoli, Albania, Thrace, Yemen, Hejaz, Syria, Mesopotamia, Kurdistan,
Armenia, were all outgoing accounts, burdens on the peasants of
Anatolia, yearly devouring a larger draft. The burden fell heaviest on
the poor villages, and each year made these poor villages yet more
poor.

The conscripts took their fate unquestioning: resignedly, after the
custom of Turkish peasantry. They were like sheep, neutrals without
vice or virtue. Left alone, they did nothing, or perhaps sat dully on
the ground. Ordered to be kind, and without haste they were as good
friends and as generous enemies as might be found. Ordered to outrage
their fathers or disembowel their mothers, they did it as calmly as
they did nothing, or did well. There was about them a hopeless,
fever-wasted lack of initiative, which made them the most biddable, most
enduring, and least spirited soldiers in the world.

Such men were natural victims of their showy-vicious Levantine
officers, to be driven to death or thrown away by neglect without
reckoning. Indeed, we found them just kept chopping-blocks of their
commanders' viler passions. So cheap did they rate them, that in
connection with them they used none of the ordinary precautions.
Medical examination of some batches of Turkish prisoners found nearly
half of them with unnaturally acquired venereal disease. Pox and its
like were not understood in the country; and the infection ran from one
to another through the battalion, where the conscripts served for six
or seven years, till at the end of their period the survivors, if they
came from decent homes, were ashamed to return, and drifted either into
the gendarmerie service, or, as broken men, into casual labour about
the towns; and so the birth-rate fell. The Turkish peasantry in
Anatolia were dying of their military service.

We could see that a new factor was needed in the East, some power or
race which would outweigh the Turks in numbers, in output, and in
mental activity. No encouragement was given us by history to think that
these qualities could be supplied ready-made from Europe. The efforts
of European Powers to keep a footing in the Asiatic Levant had been
uniformly disastrous, and we disliked no Western people enough to
inveigle them into further attempts. Our successor and solution must be
local; and fortunately the standard of efficiency required was local
also. The competition would be with Turkey; and Turkey was rotten.

Some of us judged that there was latent power enough and to spare in
the Arabic peoples (the greatest component of the old Turkish Empire),
a prolific Semitic agglomeration, great in religious thought,
reasonably industrious, mercantile, politic, yet solvent rather than
dominant in character. They had served a term of five hundred years
under the Turkish harrow, and had begun to dream of liberty; so when at
last England fell out with Turkey, and war was let loose in the East
and West at once, we who believed we held an indication of the future
set out to bend England's efforts towards fostering the new Arabic
world in hither Asia.

We were not many; and nearly all of us rallied round Clayton, the chief
of Intelligence, civil and military, in Egypt. Clayton made the perfect
leader for such a band of wild men as we were. He was calm, detached,
clear-sighted, of unconscious courage in assuming responsibility. He
gave an open run to his subordinates. His own views were general, like
his knowledge; and he worked by influence rather than by loud
direction. It was not easy to descry his influence. He was like water,
or permeating oil, creeping silently and insistently through
everything. It was not possible to say where Clayton was and was not,
and how much really belonged to him. He never visibly led; but his
ideas were abreast of those who did: he impressed men by his sobriety,
and by a certain quiet and stately moderation of hope. In practical
matters he was loose, irregular, untidy, a man with whom independent
men could bear.

The first of us was Ronald Storrs, Oriental Secretary of the Residency,
the most brilliant Englishman in the Near East, and subtly efficient,
despite his diversion of energy in love of music and letters, of
sculpture, painting, of whatever was beautiful in the world's fruit.
None the less, Storrs sowed what we reaped, and was always first, and
the great man among us. His shadow would have covered our work and
British policy in the East like a cloak, had he been able to deny
himself the world, and to prepare his mind and body with the sternness
of an athlete for a great fight.

George Lloyd entered our number. He gave us confidence, and with his
knowledge of money, proved a sure guide through the subways of trade
and politics, and a prophet upon the future arteries of the Middle
East. We would not have done so much so soon without his partnership;
but he was a restless soul, avid rather to taste than to exhaust. To
him many things were needful; and so he would not stay very long with
us. He did not see how much we liked him.

Then there was the imaginative advocate of unconvincing world-movements,
Mark Sykes: also a bundle of prejudices, intuitions, half-sciences.
His ideas were of the outside; and he lacked patience to test
his materials before choosing his style of building. He would take an
aspect of the truth, detach it from its circumstances, inflate it,
twist and model it, until its old likeness and its new unlikeness
together drew a laugh; and laughs were his triumphs. His instincts lay
in parody: by choice he was A caricaturist rather than an artist, even
in statesmanship. He saw the odd in everything, and missed the even. He
would sketch out in a few dashes a new world, ALL out of scale, but
vivid as a vision of some sides of the thing we hoped. His help did us
good and harm. For this his last week in Paris tried to atone. He had
returned from A period of political duty in Syria, after his awful
realization of the true shape of his dreams, to say gallantly, I was
wrong: here is the truth'. His former friends would not see his new
earnestness, and thought him fickle and in error; and very soon he
died. It was a tragedy of tragedies, for the Arab sake.

Not a wild man, but MENTOR to all of us was Hogarth, our father
confessor and adviser, who brought us the parallels and lessons of
history, and moderation, and courage. To the outsiders he was
peacemaker (I was all claws and teeth, and had a devil), and made us
favoured and listened to, for his weighty judgement. He had a delicate
sense of value, and would present clearly to us the forces hidden
behind the lousy rags and festering skins which we knew as Arabs.
Hogarth was our referee, and our untiring historian, who gave us his
great knowledge and careful wisdom even in the smallest things, because
he believed in what we were making. Behind him stood Cornwallis, a man
rude to look upon, but apparently forged from one of those incredible
metals with a melting-point of thousands of degrees. So he could remain
for months hotter than other men's white-heat, and yet look cold and
hard. Behind him again were others, Newcombe, Parker, Herbert, Graves,
all of the creed, and labouring stoutly after their fashion.

We called ourselves 'Intrusive' as a band; for we meant to break into
the accepted halls of English foreign policy, and build a new people in
the East, despite the rails laid down for us by our ancestors.
Therefore from our hybrid intelligence office in Cairo (a jangling
place which for its incessant bells and bustle and running to and fro,
was likened by Aubrey Herbert to an oriental railway station) we began
to work upon all chiefs, far and near. Sir Henry McMahon, High
Commissioner in Egypt, was, of course, our first effort; and his shrewd
insight and tried, experienced mind understood our design at once and
judged it good. Others, like Wemyss, Neil Malcolm, Wingate, supported
us in their pleasure at seeing the war turned constructive. Their
advocacy confirmed in Lord Kitchener the favourable impression he had
derived years before when Sherif Abdulla appealed to him in Egypt; and
so McMahon at last achieved our foundation stone, the understanding
with the Sherif of Mecca.

But before this we had had hopes of Mesopotamia. The beginning of the
Arab Independence Movement had been there, under the vigorous but
unscrupulous impulse of Seyid Taleb, and later of Yasin el Hashimi and
the military league. Aziz el Masri, Enver's rival, who was living, much
indebted to us, in Egypt, was an idol of the Arab officers. He was
approached by Lord Kitchener in the first days of the war, with the
hope of winning the Turkish Mesopotamian forces to our side.
Unfortunately Britain was bursting then with confidence in an easy and
early victory: the smashing of Turkey was called a promenade. So the
Indian Government was adverse to any pledges to the Arab nationalists
which might limit their ambitions to make the intended Mesopotamian
colony play the self-sacrificing role of a Burma for the general good.
It broke off negotiations, rejected Aziz, and interned Sayid Taleb, who
had placed himself in our hands.

By brute force it marched then into Basra. The enemy troops in Irak
were nearly all Arabs in the unenviable predicament of having to fight
on behalf of their secular oppressors against a people long envisaged
as liberators, but who obstinately refused to play the part. As may be
imagined, they fought very badly. Our forces won battle after battle
till we came to think an Indian army better than a Turkish army. There
followed our rash advance to Ctesiphon, where we met native Turkish
troops whose full heart was in the game, and were abruptly checked. We
fell back, dazed; and the long misery of Kut began.

Meanwhile, our Government had repented, and, for reasons not
unconnected with the fall of Erzerum, sent me to Mesopotamia to see
what could be done by indirect means to relieve the beleaguered
garrison. The local British had the strongest objection to my coming;
and two Generals of them were good enough to explain to me that my
mission (which they did not really know) was dishonourable to a soldier
(which I was not). As a matter of fact it was too late for action, with
Kut just dying; and in consequence I did nothing of what it was in my
mind and power to do.

The conditions were ideal for an Arab movement. The people of Nejef and
Kerbela, far in the rear of Halil Pasha's army, were in revolt against
him. The surviving Arabs in Hali's army were, on his own confession,
openly disloyal to Turkey. The tribes of the Hai and Euphrates would
have turned our way had they seen signs of grace in the British. Had we
published the promises made to the Sherif, or even the proclamation
afterwards posted in captured Bagdad, and followed it up, enough local
fighting men would have joined us to harry the Turkish line of
communication between Bagdad and Kut. A few weeks of that, and the
enemy would either have been forced to raise the siege and retire, or
have themselves suffered investment, outside Kut, nearly as stringent
as the investment of Townshend within it. Time to develop such a scheme
could easily have been gained. Had the British headquarters in
Mesopotamia obtained from the War Office eight more aeroplanes to
increase the daily carriage of food to the garrison of Kut, Townshend's
resistance might have been indefinitely prolonged. His defence was
Turkishly impregnable; and only blunders within and without forced
surrender upon him.

However, as this was not the way of the directing parties there, I
returned at once to Egypt; and till the end of the war the British in
Mesopotamia remained substantially an alien force invading enemy
territory, with the local people passively neutral or sullenly against
them, and in consequence had not the freedom of movement and elasticity
of Allenby in Syria, who entered the country as a friend, with the
local people actively on his side. The factors of numbers, climate and
communications favoured us in Mesopotamia more than in Syria; and our
higher command was, after the beginning, no less efficient and
experienced. But their casualty lists compared with Allenby's, their
wood-chopping tactics compared with his rapier-play, showed how
formidably an adverse political situation was able to cramp a purely
military operation.




CHAPTER VII



Our check in Mesopotamia was a disappointment to us; but McMahon
continued his negotiations with Mecca, and finally brought them to
success despite the evacuation of Gallipoli, the surrender of Kut, and
the generally unfortunate aspect of the war at the moment. Few people,
even of those who knew all the negotiations, had really believed that
the Sherif would fight; consequently his eventual rebellion and opening
of his coast to our ships and help took us and them by surprise.

We found our difficulties then only beginning. The credit of the new
factor was to McMahon and Clayton: professional jealousies immediately
raised their heads. Sir Archibald Murray, the General in Egypt, wanted,
naturally enough, no competitors and no competing campaigns in his
sphere. He disliked the civil power, which had so long kept the peace
between himself and General Maxwell. He could not be entrusted with the
Arabian affair; for neither he nor his staff had the ethnological
competence needed to deal with so curious a problem. On the other hand,
he could make the spectacle of the High Commission running a private
war sufficiently ridiculous. His was a very nervous mind, fanciful and
essentially competitive.

He found help in his Chief of Staff, General Lynden Bell, a red
soldier, with an instinctive shuddering away from politicians, and a
conscientiously assumed heartiness.

Two of the General Staff officers followed their leaders full cry; and
so the unfortunate McMahon found himself deprived of Army help and
reduced to waging his war in Arabia with the assistance of his Foreign
Office Attache's.

Some appeared to resent a war which allowed outsiders to thrust into
their business. Also their training in suppression, by which alone the
daily trivialities of diplomacy were made to look like man's work, had
so sunk into them that when the more important thing arrived, they made
it trivial. Their feebleness of tone, and niggling dishonesties to one
another, angered the military to disgust; and were bad for us, too,
since they patently let down the High Commissioner, whose boots the
G--s were not good enough to clean.

Wingate, who had complete confidence in his own grasp of the situation
in the Middle East, foresaw credit and great profit for the country in
the Arab development; but as criticism slowly beat up against McMahon
he dissociated himself from him, and London began to hint that better
use might be made by an experienced hand of so subtle and involved a
skein.

However it was, things in the Hejaz went from bad to worse. No proper
liaison was provided for the Arab forces in the field, no military
information was given the Sherifs, no tactical advice or strategy was
suggested, no attempt made to find out the local conditions and adapt
existing Allied resources in material to suit their needs. The French
Military Mission (which Clayton's prudence had suggested be sent to
Hejaz to soothe our very suspicious allies by taking them behind the
scenes and giving them a purpose there), was permitted to carry on an
elaborate intrigue against Sherif Hussein in his towns of Jidda and
Mecca, and to propose to him and to the British authorities measures
that must have ruined his cause in the eyes of all Moslems. Wingate,
now in military control of our cooperation with the Sherif, was induced
to land some foreign troops at Rabegh, half-way between Medina and
Mecca, for the defence of Mecca and to hold up the further advance of
the reinvigorated Turks from Medina. McMahon, in the multitude of
counsellors, became confused, and gave a handle to Murray to cry out
against his inconsistencies. The Arab Revolt became discredited; and
Staff Officers in Egypt gleefully prophesied to us its near failure and
the stretching of Sherif Hussein's neck on a Turkish scaffold.

My private position was not easy. As Staff Captain under Clayton in Sir
Archibald Murray's Intelligence Section, I was charged with the
'distribution' of the Turkish Army and the preparation of maps. By
natural inclination I had added to them the invention of the Arab
Bulletin, a secret weekly record of Middle-Eastern politics; and of
necessity Clayton came more and more to need me in the military wing of
the Arab Bureau, the tiny intelligence and war staff for foreign
affairs, which he was now organizing for McMahon. Eventually Clayton
was driven out of the General Staff; and Colonel Holdich, Murray's
intelligence officer at Ismailia, took his place in command of us. His
first intention was to retain my services; and, since he clearly did
not need me, I interpreted this, not without some friendly evidence, as
a method of keeping me away from the Arab affair. I decided that I must
escape at once, if ever. A straight request was refused; so I took to
stratagems. I became, on the telephone (G.H.Q. were at Ismailia, and I
in Cairo) quite intolerable to the Staff on the Canal. I took every
opportunity to rub into them their comparative ignorance and
inefficiency in the department of intelligence (not difficult!) and
irritated them yet further by literary airs, correcting Shavian split
infinitives and tautologies in their reports.

In a few days they were bubbling over on my account, and at last
determined to endure me no longer. I took this strategic opportunity to
ask for ten days' leave, saying that Storrs was going down to Jidda on
business with the Grand Sherif, and that I would like a holiday and
joyride in the Red Sea with him. They did not love Storrs, and were
glad to get rid of me for the moment. So they agreed at once, and began
to prepare against my return some official shelf for me. Needless to
say, I had no intention of giving them such a chance; for, while very
ready to hire my body out on petty service, I hesitated to throw my
mind frivolously away. So I went to Clayton and confessed my affairs;
and he arranged for the Residency to make telegraphic application to
the Foreign Office for my transfer to the Arab Bureau. The Foreign
Office would treat directly with the War Office; and the Egypt command
would not hear of it, till all was ended.

Storrs and I then marched off together, happily. In the East they swore
that by three sides was the decent way across a square; and my trick to
escape was in this sense oriental. But I justified myself by my
confidence in the final success of the Arab Revolt if properly advised.
I had been a mover in its beginning; my hopes lay in it. The fatalistic
subordination of a professional soldier (intrigue being unknown in the
British army) would have made a proper officer sit down and watch his
plan of campaign wrecked by men who thought nothing of it, and to whose
spirit it made no appeal. NON NOBIS, DOMINE.





BOOK ONE. The Discovery of Feisal




CHAPTERS VIII TO XVI



I HAD BELIEVED THESE MISFORTUNES OF THE REVOLT TO BE DUE MAINLY TO
FAULTY LEADERSHIP, OR RATHER TO THE LACK OF LEADERSHIP, ARAB AND
ENGLISH. SO I WENT DOWN TO ARABIA TO SEE AND CONSIDER ITS GREAT MEN.
THE FIRST, THE SHERIF OF MECCA, WE KNEW TO BE AGED. I FOUND ABDULLA TOO
CLEVER, ALI TOO CLEAN, ZEID TOO COOL.

THEN I RODE UP-COUNTRY TO FEISAL, AND FOUND IN HIM THE LEADER WITH THE
NECESSARY FIRE, AND YET WITH REASON TO GIVE EFFECT TO OUR SCIENCE. HIS
TRIBESMEN SEEMED SUFFICIENT INSTRUMENT, AND HIS HILLS TO PROVIDE
NATURAL ADVANTAGE. SO I RETURNED PLEASED AND CONFIDENT TO EGYPT, AND
TOLD MY CHIEFS HOW MECCA WAS DEFENDED NOT BY THE OBSTACLE OF RABEGH,
BUT BY THE FLANK-THREAT OF FEISAL IN JEBEL SUBH.




CHAPTER VIII



Waiting off Suez was the LAMA, a small converted liner; and in her we
left immediately. Such short voyages on warships were delicious
interludes for us passengers. On this occasion, however, there was some
embarrassment. Our mixed party seemed to disturb the ship's company in
their own element. The juniors had turned out of their berths to give
us night space, and by day we filled their living rooms with irregular
talk. Storrs' intolerant brain seldom stooped to company. But to-day he
was more abrupt than usual. He turned twice around the decks, sniffed,
'No one worth talking to', and sat down in one of the two comfortable
armchairs, to begin a discussion of Debussy with Aziz el Masri (in the
other). Aziz, the Arab-Circassian ex-colonel in the Turkish Army, now
general in the Sherifian Army, was on his way to discuss with the Emir
of Mecca the equipment and standing of the Arab regulars he was forming
at Rabegh. A few minutes later they had left Debussy, and were
depreciating Wagner: Aziz in fluent German, and Storrs in German,
French and Arabic. The ship's officers found the whole conversation
unnecessary.

We had the accustomed calm run to Jidda, in the delightful Red Sea
climate, never too hot while the ship was moving. By day we lay in
shadow; and for great part of the glorious nights we would tramp up and
down the wet decks under the stars in the steaming breath of the
southern wind. But when at last we anchored in the outer harbour, off
the white town hung between the blazing sky and its reflection in the
mirage which swept and rolled over the wide lagoon, then the heat of
Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless. It was
midday; and the noon sun in the East, like moonlight, put to sleep the
colours. There were only lights and shadows, the white houses and black
gaps of streets: in front, the pallid lustre of the haze shimmering
upon the inner harbour: behind, the dazzle of league after league of
featureless sand, running up to an edge of low hills, faintly suggested
in the far away mist of heat.

Just north of Jidda was a second group of black-white buildings, moving
up and down like pistons in the mirage, as the ship rolled at anchor
and the intermittent wind shifted the heat waves in the air. It looked
and felt horrible. We began to regret that the inaccessibility which
made the Hejaz militarily a safe theatre of revolt involved bad climate
and un-wholesomeness.

However, Colonel Wilson, British representative with the new Arab
state, had sent his launch to meet us; and we had to go ashore to learn
the reality of the men levitating in that mirage. Half an hour later
Ruhi, Consular Oriental assistant, was grinning a delighted welcome to
his old patron Storrs (Ruhi the ingenious, more like a mandrake than a
man), while the newly-appointed Syrian police and harbour officers,
with a scratch guard of honour, lined the Customs Wharf in salutation
of Aziz el Masri. Sherif Abdulla, the second son of the old man of
Mecca, was reported just arriving in the town. He it was we had to
meet; so our coming was auspiciously timed.

We walked past the white masonry of the still-building water gate, and
through the oppressive alley of the food market on our way to the
Consulate. In the air, from the men to the dates and back to the meat,
squadrons of flies like particles of dust danced up and down the
sunshafts which stabbed into the darkest corners of the booths through
torn places in the wood and sackcloth awnings overhead. The atmosphere
was like a bath. The scarlet leathers of the armchair on the LAMA'S
deck had dyed Storrs' white tunic and trousers as bright as themselves
in their damp contact of the last four days, and now the sweat running
in his clothes began to shine like varnish through the stain. I was so
fascinated watching him that I never noticed the deepened brown of my
khaki drill wherever it touched my body. He was wondering if the walk
to the Consulate was long enough to wet me a decent, solid, harmonious
colour; and I was wondering if all he ever sat on would grow scarlet as
himself.

We reached the Consulate too soon for either hope; and there in a
shaded room with an open lattice behind him sat Wilson, prepared to
welcome the sea breeze, which had lagged these last few days. He
received us stiffly, being of the honest, downright Englishmen, to whom
Storrs was suspect, if only for his artistic sense: while his contact
with me in Cairo had been a short difference of opinion as to whether
native clothes were an indignity for us. I had called them
uncomfortable merely. To him they were wrong. Wilson, however, despite
his personal feelings, was all for the game. He had made preparations
for the coming interview with Abdulla, and was ready to afford every
help he could. Besides, we were his guests; and the splendid
hospitality of the East was near his spirit.

Abdulla, on a white mare, came to us softly with a bevy of richly-armed
slaves on foot about him, through the silent respectful salutes of the
town. He was flushed with his success at Taif, and happy. I was seeing
him for the first time, while Storrs was an old friend, and on the best
of terms; yet, before long, as they spoke together, I began to suspect
him of a constant cheerfulness. His eyes had a confirmed twinkle; and
though only thirty-five, he was putting on flesh. It might be due to
too much laughter. Life seemed very merry for Abdulla. He was short,
strong, fair-skinned, with a carefully trimmed brown beard, masking his
round smooth face and short lips. In manner he was open, or affected
openness, and was charming on acquaintance. He stood not on ceremony,
but jested with all comers in most easy fashion: yet, when we fell into
serious talk, the veil of humour seemed to fade away. He then chose his
words, and argued shrewdly. Of course, he was in discussion with
Storrs, who demanded a high standard from his opponent.

The Arabs thought Abdulla a far-seeing statesman and an astute
politician. Astute he certainly was, but not greatly enough to convince
us always of his sincerity. His ambition was patent. Rumour made him
the brain of his father and of the Arab revolt; but he seemed too easy
for that. His object was, of course, the winning of Arab independence
and the building up of Arab nations, but he meant to keep the direction
of the new states in the family. So he watched us, and played through
us to the British gallery.

On our part, I was playing for effect, watching, criticizing him. The
Sherifs rebellion had been unsatisfactory for the last few months
(standing still, which, with an irregular war, was the prelude to
disaster), and my suspicion was that its lack was leadership: not
intellect, nor judgement, nor political wisdom, but the flame of
enthusiasm that would set the desert on fire. My visit was mainly to
find the yet unknown master-spirit of the affair, and measure his
capacity to carry the revolt to the goal I had conceived for it. As our
conversation continued, I became more and more sure that Abdulla was
too balanced, too cool, too humorous to be a prophet: especially the
armed prophet who, if history be true, succeeded in revolutions. His
value would come perhaps in the peace after success. During the
physical struggle, when singleness of eye and magnetism, devotion and
self-sacrifice were needed, Abdulla would be a tool too complex for a
simple purpose, though he could not be ignored, even now.

We talked to him first about the state of Jidda, to put him at ease by
discussing at this first of our interviews the unnecessary subject of
the Sherif's administration. He replied that the war was yet too much
with them for civil government. They had inherited the Turkish system
in the towns, and were continuing it on a more modest scale. The
Turkish Government was often not unkind to strong men, who obtained
considerable licence on terms. Consequently, some of the licensees in
Hejaz regretted the coming of a native ruler. Particularly in Mecca and
Jidda public opinion was against an Arab state. The mass of citizens
were foreigners--Egyptians, Indians, Javanese, Africans, and
others--quite unable to sympathize with the Arab aspirations, especially
as voiced by Beduin; for the Beduin lived on what he could exact from the
stranger on his roads, or in his valleys; and he and the townsman bore
each other a perpetual grudge.

The Beduins were the only fighting men the Sherif had got; and on their
help the revolt depended. He was arming them freely, paying many of
them for their service in his forces, feeding their families while they
were from home, and hiring from them their transport camels to maintain
his armies in the field. Accordingly, the country was prosperous, while
the towns went short.

Another grievance in the towns was in the matter of law. The Turkish
civil code had been abolished, and a return made to the old religious
law, the undiluted Koranic procedure of the Arab Kadi. Abdulla
explained to us, with a giggle, that when there was time they would
discover in the Koran such opinions and judgements as were required to
make it suitable for modern commercial operations, like banking and
exchange. Meanwhile, of course, what townsmen lost by the abolition of
the civil law, the Beduins gained. Sherif Hussein had silently
sanctioned the restoration of the old tribal order. Beduins at odds
with one another pleaded their own cases before the tribal lawman, an
office hereditary in one most-respected family, and recognized by the
payment of a goat per household as yearly due. Judgement was based on
custom, by quoting from a great body of remembered precedent. It was
delivered publicly without fee. In cases between men of different
tribes, the lawman was selected by mutual consent, or recourse was had
to the lawman of a third tribe. If the case were contentious and
difficult, the judge was supported by a jury of four--two nominated by
plaintiff from the ranks of defendant's family, and two by defendant
from plaintiff's family. Decisions were always unanimous.

We contemplated the vision Abdulla drew for us, with sad thoughts of
the Garden of Eden and all that Eve, now lying in her tomb just outside
the wall, had lost for average humanity; and then Storrs brought me
into the discussion by asking Abdulla to give us his views on the state
of the campaign for my benefit, and for communication to headquarters
in Egypt. Abdulla at once grew serious, and said that he wanted to urge
upon the British their immediate and very personal concern in the
matter, which he tabulated so:--

By our neglect to cut the Hejaz Railway, the Turks had been able to
collect transport and supplies for the reinforcement of Medina.

Feisal had been driven back from the town; and the enemy was preparing
a mobile column of all arms for an advance on Rabegh.

The Arabs in the hills across their road were by our neglect too weak
in supplies, machine guns and artillery to defend them long.

Hussein Mabeirig, chief of the Masruh Harb, had joined the Turks. If
the Medina column advanced, the Harb would join it.

It would only remain for his father to put himself at the head of his
own people of Mecca, and to die fighting before the Holy City.

At this moment the telephone rang: the Grand Sherif wanted to speak to
Abdulla. He was told of the point our conversation had reached, and at
once confirmed that he would so act in the extremity. The Turks would
enter Mecca over his dead body. The telephone rang off; and Abdulla,
smiling a little, asked, to prevent such a disaster, that a British
brigade, if possible of Moslem troops, be kept at Suez, with transport
to rush it to Rabegh as soon as the Turks debouched from Medina in
their attack. What did we think of the proposal?

I replied; first, historically, that Sherif Hussein had asked us not to
cut the Hejaz line, since he would need it for his victorious advance
into Syria; second, practically, that the dynamite we sent down for
demolitions had been returned by him with a note that it was too
dangerous for Arab use; third, specifically, that we had had no demands
for equipment from Feisal.

With regard to the brigade for Rabegh, it was a complicated question.
Shipping was precious; and we could not hold empty transports
indefinitely at Suez. We had no Moslem units in our Army. A British
brigade was a cumbersome affair, and would take long to embark and
disembark. The Rabegh position was large. A brigade would hardly hold
it and would be quite unable to detach a force to prevent a Turkish
column slipping past it inland. The most they could do would be to
defend the beach, under a ship's guns and the ship could do that as
well without the troops.

Abdulla replied that ships were insufficient morally, as the
Dardanelles fighting had destroyed the old legend of the British Navy
and its omnipotence. No Turks could slip past Rabegh; for it was the
only water supply in the district, and they must water at its wells.
The earmarking of a brigade and transports need be only temporary; for
he was taking his victorious Taif troops up the eastern road from Mecca
to Medina. As soon as he was in position, he would give orders to Ah'
and Feisal, who would close in from the south and west, and their
combined forces would deliver a grand attack, in which Medina would,
please God, be taken. Meanwhile, Aziz el Masri was moulding the
volunteers from Mesopotamia and Syria into battalions at Rabegh. When
we had added the Arab prisoners of war from India and Egypt, there
would be enough to take over the duties momentarily allotted to the
British brigade.

I said that I would represent his views to Egypt, but that the British
were reluctant to spare troops from the vital defence of Egypt (though
he was not to imagine that the Canal was in any danger from the Turks)
and, still more, to send Christians to defend the people of the Holy
City against their enemies; as some Moslems in India, who considered
the Turkish Government had an imprescriptable right to the Haramein,
would misrepresent our motives and action. I thought that I might
perhaps urge his opinions more powerfully if I was able to report on
the Rabegh question in the light of my own knowledge of the position
and local feeling. I would also like to see Feisal, and talk over with
him his needs and the prospects of a prolonged defence of his hills by
the tribesmen if we strengthened them materially. I would like to ride
from Rabegh up the Sultani road towards Medina as far as Feisal's camp.

Storrs then came in and supported me with all his might, urging the
vital importance of full and early information from a trained observer
for the British Commander-in-Chief in Egypt, and showing that his
sending down me, his best qualified and most indispensable staff
officer, proved the serious consideration being given to Arabian
affairs by Sir Archibald Murray. Abdulla went to the telephone and
tried to get his father's consent to my going up country. The Sherif
viewed the proposal with grave distrust. Abdulla argued the point, made
some advantage, and transferred the mouthpiece to Storrs, who turned
all his diplomacy on the old man. Storrs in FULL blast was a delight to
listen to in the mere matter of Arabic speech, and also a lesson to
every Englishman alive of how to deal with suspicious or unwilling
Orientals. It was nearly impossible to resist him for more than a few
minutes, and in this case also he had his way. The Sherif asked again
for Abdulla, and authorized him to write to Ali, and suggest that if he
thought fit, and if conditions were normal, I might be allowed to
proceed to Feisal in Jebel Subh; and Abdulla, under Storrs' influence,
transformed this guarded message into direct written instructions to
Ali to mount me as well and as quickly as possible, and convey me, by
sure hand, to Feisal's camp. This being all I wanted, and half what
Storrs wanted, we adjourned for lunch.




CHAPTER IX



Jeddah had pleased us, on our way to the Consulate: so after lunch,
when it was a little cooler, or at least when the sun was not so high,
we wandered out to see the sights under the guidance of Young, Wilson's
assistant, a man who found good in many old things, but little good in
things now being made.

It was indeed a remarkable town. The streets were alleys, wood roofed
in the main bazaar, but elsewhere open to the sky in the little gap
between the tops of the lofty white-walled houses. These were built
four or five stories high, of coral rag tied with square beams and
decorated by wide bow-windows running from ground to roof in grey
wooden panels. There was no glass in Jidda, but a profusion of good
lattices, and some very delicate shallow chiselling on the panels of
window casings. The doors were heavy two-leaved slabs of teak-wood,
deeply carved, often with wickets in them; and they had rich hinges and
ring-knockers of hammered iron. There was much moulded or cut
plastering, and on the older houses fine stone heads and jambs to the
windows looking on the inner courts.

The style of architecture was like crazy Elizabethan half-timber work,
in the elaborate Cheshire fashion, but gone gimcrack to an incredible
degree. House-fronts were fretted, pierced and pargetted till they
looked as though cut out of cardboard for a romantic stage-setting.
Every storey jutted, every window leaned one way or other; often the
very walls sloped. It was like a dead city, so clean underfoot, and so
quiet. Its winding, even streets were floored with damp sand solidified
by time and as silent to the tread as any carpet. The lattices and
wall-returns deadened all reverberation of voice. There were no carts,
nor any streets wide enough for carts, no shod animals, no bustle
anywhere. Everything was hushed, strained, even furtive. The doors of
houses shut softly as we passed. There were no loud dogs, no crying
children: indeed, except in the bazaar, still half asleep, there were
few wayfarers of any kind; and the rare people we did meet, all thin,
and as it were wasted by disease, with scarred, hairless faces and
screwed-up eyes, slipped past us quickly and cautiously, not looking at
us. Their skimp, white robes, shaven polls with little skull-caps, red
cotton shoulder-shawls, and bare feet were so same as to be almost a
uniform.

The atmosphere was oppressive, deadly. There seemed no life in it. It
was not burning hot, but held a moisture and sense of great age and
exhaustion such as seemed to belong to no other place: not a passion of
smells like Smyrna, Naples or Marseilles, but a feeling of long use, of
the exhalations of many people, of continued bath-heat and sweat. One
would say that for years Jidda had not been swept through by a firm
breeze: that its streets kept their air from year's end to year's end,
from the day they were built for so long as the houses should endure.
There was nothing in the bazaars to buy.

In the evening the telephone rang; and the Sherif called Storrs to the
instrument. He asked if we would not like to listen to his band.
Storrs, in astonishment, asked What band? and congratulated his
holiness on having advanced so far towards urbanity. The Sherif
explained that the headquarters of the Hejaz Command under the Turks
had had a brass band, which played each night to the Governor General;
and when the Governor General was captured by Abdulla at Taif his band
was captured with him. The other prisoners were sent to Egypt for
internment; but the band was excepted. It was held in Mecca to give
music to the victors. Sherif Hussein laid his receiver on the table of
his reception hall, and we, called solemnly one by one to the
telephone, heard the band in the Palace at Mecca forty-five miles away.
Storrs expressed the general gratification; and the Sherif, increasing
his bounty replied that the band should be sent down by forced march to
Jidda, to play in our courtyard also, 'And,' said he, 'you may then do
me the pleasure of ringing me up from your end, that I may share your
satisfaction.'

Next day Storrs visited Abdulla in his tent out by Eve's Tomb; and
together they inspected the hospital, the barracks, the town offices,
and partook of the hospitality of the Mayor and the Governor. In the
intervals of duty they talked about money, and the Sherif s tide, and
his relations with the other Princes of Arabia, and the general course
of the war: all the commonplaces that should pass between envoys of two
Governments. It was tedious, and for the most part I held myself
excused, as after a conversation in the morning I had made up my mind
that Abdulla was not the necessary leader. We had asked him to sketch
the genesis of the Arab movement: and his reply illuminated his
character. He had begun by a long description of Talaat, the first Turk
to speak to him with concern of the restlessness of Hejaz. He wanted it
properly subdued, and military service, as elsewhere in the Empire,
introduced.

Abdulla, to forestall him, had made a plan of peaceful insurrection for
Hejaz, and, after sounding Kitchener without profit, had dated it
provisionally for 1915. He had meant to call out the tribes during the
feast, and lay hold of the pilgrims. They would have included many of
the chief men of Turkey besides leading Moslems of Egypt, India, Java,
Eritrea, and Algiers. With these thousands of hostages in his hands he
had expected to win the notice of the Great Powers concerned. He
thought they would bring pressure on the Porte to secure the release of
their nationals. The Porte, powerless to deal with Hejaz militarily,
would either have made concessions to the Sherif or have confessed its
powerlessness to the foreign States. In the latter event, Abdulla would
have approached them direct, ready to meet their demands in return for
a guarantee of immunity from Turkey. I did not like his scheme, and was
glad when he said with almost a sneer that Feisal in fear had begged
his father not to follow it. This sounded good for Feisal, towards whom
my hopes of a great leader were now slowly turning.

In the evening Abdulla came to dine with Colonel Wilson. We received
him in the courtyard on the house steps. Behind him were his brilliant
household servants and slaves, and behind them a pale crew of bearded,
emaciated men with woe-begone faces, wearing tatters of military
uniform, and carrying tarnished brass instruments of music. Abdulla
waved his hand towards them and crowed with delight, 'My Band'. We sat
them on benches in the forecourt, and Wilson sent them cigarettes,
while we went up to the dining room, where the shuttered balcony was
opened right out, hungrily, for a sea breeze. As we sat down, the band,
under the guns and swords of Abdulla's retainers, began, each
instrument apart, to play heartbroken Turkish airs. Our ears ached with
noise; but Abdulla beamed.

Curious the party was. Abdulla himself, Vice-President IN PARTIBUS of
the Turkish Chamber and now Foreign Minister of the rebel Arab State;
Wilson, Governor of the Red Sea Province of the Sudan, and His
Majesty's Minister with the Sherif of Mecca; Storrs, Oriental Secretary
successively to Gorst, Kitchener and McMahon in Cairo; Young, Cochrane,
and myself, hangers-on of the staff; Sayed Ali, a general in the
Egyptian Army, commander of the detachment sent over by the Sirdar to
help the first efforts of the Arabs; Aziz el Masri, now Chief of Staff
of the Arab regular army, but in old days Enver's rival, leader of the
Turkish and Senussi forces against the Italians, chief conspirator of
the Arab officers in the Turkish army against the Committee of Union
and Progress, a man condemned to death by the Turks for obeying the
Treaty of Lausanne, and saved by THE TIMES and Lord Kitchener.

We got tired of Turkish music, and asked for German. Aziz stepped out
on the balcony and called down to the bandsmen in Turkish to play us
something foreign. They struck shakily into 'Deutschland uber Alles'
just as the Sherif came to his telephone in Mecca to listen to the
music of our feast. We asked for more German music; and they played
'Eine feste Burg'. Then in the midst they died away into flabby
discords of drums. The parchment had stretched in the damp air of
Jidda. They cried for fire; and Wilson's servants and Abdulla's
bodyguard brought them piles of straw and packing cases. They warmed
the drums, turning them round and round before the blaze, and then
broke into what they said was the Hymn of Hate, though no one could
recognize a European progression in it all. Sayed Ali turned to Abdulla
and said, 'It is a death march'. Abdulla's eyes widened; but Storrs who
spoke in quickly to the rescue turned the moment to laughter; and we
sent out rewards with the leavings of the feast to the sorrowful
musicians, who could take no pleasure in our praises, but begged to be
sent home. Next morning I left Jidda by ship for Rabegh.




CHAPTER X



Moored in Rabegh lay the NORTHBROOK, an Indian Marine ship. On board
was Colonel Parker, our liaison officer with Sherif Ali, to whom he
sent my letter from Abdulla, giving Ali the father's 'orders' to send
me at once up to Feisal. Ah' was staggered at their tenour, but could
not help himself; for his only telegraph to Mecca was by the ship's
wireless, and he was ashamed to send personal remonstrances through us.
So he made the best of it, and prepared for me his own splendid
riding-camel, saddled with his own saddle, and hung with luxurious
housings and cushions of Nejd leather-work pieced and inlaid in various
colours, with plaited fringes and nets embroidered with metal tissues.
As a trustworthy man he chose out Tafas el Raashid, a Hawazim Harb
tribesman, with his son, to guide me to Feisal's camp.

He did all this with the better grace for the countenance of Nuri Said,
the Bagdadi staff officer, whom I had befriended once in Cairo when he
was ill. Nuri was now second in command of the regular force which Aziz
el Masri was raising and training here. Another friend at court was
Faisel Ghusein, a secretary. He was a Sulut Sheikh from the Hauran, and
a former official of the Turkish Government, who had escaped across
Armenia during the war, and had eventually reached Miss Gertrude Bell
in Basra. She had sent HIM on to me with a warm recommendation.

To Ali himself I took a great fancy. He was of middle height, thin, and
looking already more than his thirty-seven years. He stooped a little.
His skin was sallow, his eyes large and deep and brown, his nose thin
and rather hooked, his mouth sad and drooping. He had a spare black
beard and very delicate hands. His manner was dignified and admirable,
but direct; and he struck me as a pleasant gentleman, conscientious,
without great force of character, nervous, and rather tired. His
physical weakness (he was consumptive) made him subject to quick fits
of shaking passion, preceded and followed by long moods of infirm
obstinacy. He was bookish, learned in law and religion, and pious
almost to fanaticism. He was too conscious of his high heritage to be
ambitious; and his nature was too clean to see or suspect interested
motives in those about him. Consequently he was much the prey of any
constant companion, and too sensitive to advice for a great leader,
though his purity of intention and conduct gained him the love of those
who came into direct contact with him. If Feisal should turn out to be
no prophet, the revolt would make shift well enough with Ali for its
head. I thought him more definitely Arab than Abdulla, or than Zeid,
his young half-brother, who was helping him at Rabegh, and came down
with Ali and Nuri and Aziz to the palm-groves to see me start. Zeid was
a shy, white, beardless lad of perhaps nineteen, calm and flippant, no
zealot for the revolt. Indeed, his mother was Turkish; and he had been
brought up in the harem, so that he could hardly feel great sympathy
with an Arab revival; but he did his best this day to be pleasant, and
surpassed AM, perhaps because his feelings were not much outraged at
the departure of a Christian into the Holy Province under the auspices
of the Emir of Mecca. Zeid, of course, was even less than Abdulla the
born leader of my quest. Yet I liked him, and could see that he would
be a decided man when he had found himself.

Ali would not let me start till after sunset, lest any of his followers
see me leave the camp. He kept my journey a secret even from his
slaves, and gave me an Arab cloak and head-cloth to wrap round myself
and my uniform, that I might present a proper silhouette in the dark
upon my camel. I had no food with me; so he instructed Tafas to get
something to eat at Bir el Sheikh, the first settlement, some sixty
miles out, and charged him most stringently to keep me from questioning
and curiosity on the way, and to avoid all camps and encounters. The
Masruh Harb, who inhabited Rabegh and district, paid only lip-service
to the Sherif. Their real allegiance was to Hussein Mabeirig, the
ambitious sheikh of the clan, who was jealous of the Emir of Mecca and
had fallen out with him. He was now a fugitive, living in the hills to
the East, and was known to be in touch with the Turks. His people were
not notably pro-Turkish, but owed him obedience. If he had heard of my
departure he might well have ordered a band of them to stop me on my
way through his district.

Tafas was a Hazimi, of the Beni Salem branch of Harb, and so not on
good terms with the Masruh. This inclined him towards me; and when he
had once accepted the charge of escorting me to Feisal, we could trust
him. The fidelity of road-companions was most dear to Arab tribesmen.
The guide had to answer to a sentimental public with his Me for that of
his fellow. One Harbi, who promised to take Huber to Medina and broke
his word and killed him on the road near Rabegh, when he found out that
he was a Christian, was ostracized by public opinion, and, in spite of
the religious prejudices in his favour, had ever since lived miserably
alone in the hills, cut off from friendly intercourse, and refused
permission to marry any daughter of the tribe. So we could depend upon
the good will of Tafas and his son, Abdulla; and Ali endeavoured by
detailed instructions to ensure that their performance should be as
good as their intention.

We marched through the palm-groves which lay like a girdle about the
scattered houses of Rabegh village, and then out under the stars along
the Tehama, the sandy and featureless strip of desert bordering the
western coast of Arabia between sea-beach and littoral hills, for
hundreds of monotonous miles. In day-time this low plain was
insufferably hot, and its waterless character made it a forbidding
road; yet it was inevitable, since the more fruitful hills were too
rugged to afford passage north and south for loaded animals.

The cool of the night was pleasant after the day of checks and
discussions which had so dragged at Rabegh. Tafas led on without
speaking, and the camels went silently over the soft flat sand. My
thoughts as we went were how this was the pilgrim road, down which, for
uncounted generations, the people of the north had come to visit the
Holy City, bearing with them gifts of faith for the shrine; and it
seemed that the Arab revolt might be in a sense a return pilgrimage, to
take back to the north, to Syria, an ideal for an ideal, a belief in
liberty for their past belief in a revelation.

We endured for some hours, without variety except at times when the
camels plunged and strained a little and the saddles creaked:
indications that the soft plain had merged into beds of drift-sand,
dotted with tiny scrub, and therefore uneven going, since the plants
collected little mounds about their roots, and the eddies of the sea-winds
scooped hollows in the intervening spaces. Camels appeared not
sure-footed in the dark, and the starlit sand carried little shadow, so
that hummocks and holes were difficult to see. Before midnight we
halted, and I rolled myself tighter in my cloak, and chose A. hollow of
my own size and shape, and slept well in it till nearly dawn.

As soon as he felt the air growing chill with the coming change, Tafas
got up, and two minutes later we were swinging forward again. An hour
after it grew bright, as we climbed a low neck of lava drowned nearly
to the top with blown sand. This joined a small flow near the shore to
the main Hejaz lava-field, whose western edge ran up upon our right
hand, and caused the coast road to lie where it did. The neck was
stony, but brief: on each side the blue lava humped itself into low
shoulders, from which, so Tafas said, it was possible to see ships
sailing on the sea. Pilgrims had built cairns here by the road.
Sometimes they were individual piles, of just three stones set up one
above the other: sometimes they were common heaps, to which any
disposed passer-by might add his stone--not reasonably nor with known
motive, but because others did, and perhaps they knew.

Beyond the ridge the path descended into a broad open place, the
Masturah, or plain by which Wadi Fura flowed into the sea. Seaming its
surface with innumerable interwoven channels of loose stone, a few
inches deep, were the beds of the flood water, on those rare occasions
when there was rain in the Tareif and the courses raged like rivers to
the sea. The delta here was about six miles wide. Down some part of it
water flowed for an hour or two, or even for a day or two, every so
many years. Underground there was plenty of moisture, protected by the
overlying sand from the sun-heat; and thorn trees and loose scrub
profited by it and flourished. Some of the trunks were a foot through:
their height might be twenty feet. The trees and bushes stood somewhat
apart, in clusters, their lower branches cropped by the hungry camels.
So they looked cared for, and had a premeditated air, which felt
strange in the wilderness, more especially as the Tehama hitherto had
been a sober bareness.

Two hours up-stream, so Tafas told me, was the throat where Wadi Fura
issued from the last granite hills, and there had been built a little
village, Khoreiba, of running water channels and wells and palm-groves,
inhabited by a small population of freedmen engaged in date husbandry.
This was important. We had not understood that the bed of Wadi Fura
served as a direct road from near Medina to the neighbourhood of
Rabegh. It lay so far south and east of Feisal's supposed position in
the hills that he could hardly be said to cover it. Also Abdulla had
not warned us of the existence of Khoreiba, though it materially
affected the Rabegh question, by affording the enemy a possible
watering-place, safe from our interference, and from the guns of our
warships. At Khoreiba the Turks could concentrate a large force to
attack our proposed brigade in Rabegh.

In reply to further questions, Tafas disclosed that at Hajar, east of
Rabegh in the hills, was yet another supply of water, in the hands of
the Masruh, and now the headquarters of Hussein Mabeirig, their
Turcophil chief. The Turks could make that their next stage from
Khoreiba towards Mecca, leaving Rabegh unmolested and harmless on their
flank. This meant that the asked-for British Brigade would be unable to
save Mecca from the Turks. For that purpose would be required a force
with A front or a radius of action of some twenty miles, in order to
deny all three water-supplies to the enemy.

Meanwhile in the early sunlight we lifted our camels to a steady trot
across the good going of these shingle-beds among the trees, making for
Masturah well, the first stage out from Rabegh on the pilgrim road.
There we would water and halt a little. My camel was a delight to me,
for I had not been on such an animal before. There were no good camels
in Egypt; and those of the Sinai Desert, while hardy and strong, were
not taught to pace fair and softly and swiftly, like these rich mounts
of the Arabian princes.

Yet her accomplishments were to-day largely wasted, since they were
reserved for riders who had the knack and asked for them, and not for
me, who expected to be carried, and had no sense of how to ride. It was
easy to sit on a camel's back without falling off, but very difficult
to understand and get the best out of her so as to do long journeys
without fatiguing either rider or beast. Tafas gave me hints as we
went: indeed, it was one of the few subjects on which he would speak.
His orders to preserve me from contact with the world seemed to have
closed even his mouth. A pity, for his dialect interested me.

Quite close to the north bank of the Masturah, we found the well.
Beside it were some decayed stone walls which had been a hut, and
opposite it some little shelters of branches and palm-leaves, under
which a few Beduin were sitting. We did not greet them. Instead, Tafas
turned across to the ruinous walls, and dismounted; and I sat in their
shade while he and Abdulla watered the animals, and drew a drink for
themselves and for me. The well was old, and broad, with a good stone
steyning, and a strong coping round the top. It was about twenty feet
deep; and for the convenience of travellers without ropes, like
ourselves, a square chimney had been contrived in the masonry, with
foot and hand holds in the corners, so that a man might descend to the
water, and fill his goat-skin.

Idle hands had flung so many stones down the shaft, that half the
bottom of the well was choked, and the water not abundant. Abdulla tied
his flowing sleeves about his shoulders; tucked his gown under his
cartridge belt; and clambered nimbly down and up, bringing each time
four or five gallons which he poured for our camels into a stone trough
beside the well. They drank about five gallons each, for they had been
watered at Rabegh a day back. Then we let them moon about a little,
while we sat in peace, breathing the light wind coming off the sea.
Abdulla smoked a cigarette as reward for his exertions.

Some Harb came up, driving a large herd of brood camels, and began to
water them, having sent one man down the well to fill their large
leather bucket, which the others drew up hand over hand with a loud
staccato chant. We watched them, without intercourse; for these were
Masruh, and we Beni Salem; and while the two clans were now at peace,
and might pass through each other's districts, this was only a
temporary accommodation to further the Sherifs' war against the Turks,
and had little depth of goodwill in it.

As we watched, two riders, trotting light and fast on thoroughbred
camels, drew towards us from the north. Both were young. One was
dressed in rich Cashmere robes and heavy silk embroidered head-cloth.
The other was plainer, in white cotton, with a red cotton head-dress.
They halted beside the well; and the more splendid one slipped
gracefully to the ground without kneeling his camel, and threw his
halter to his companion, saying, carelessly, 'Water them while I go
over there and rest'. Then he strolled across and sat down under our
wall, after glancing at us with affected unconcern. He offered a
cigarette, just rolled and licked, saying, Tour presence is from
Syria?' I parried politely, suggesting that he was from Mecca, to which
he likewise made no direct reply. We spoke a little of the war and of
the leanness of the Masruh she-camels.

Meanwhile the other rider stood by, vacantly holding the halters,
waiting perhaps for the Harb to finish watering their herd before
taking his turn. The young lord cried What is it, Mustafa? Water them
at once'. The servant came up to say dismally, They will not let me'.
'God's mercy!' shouted his master furiously, as he scrambled to his
feet and hit the unfortunate Mustafa three or four sharp blows about
the head and shoulders with his riding-stick 'Go and ask them.' Mustafa
looked hurt, astonished, and angry as though he would hit back, but
thought better of it, and ran to the well.

The Harb, shocked, in pity made a place for him, and let his two camels
drink from their water-trough. They whispered, 'Who is he?' and
Mustapha said, 'Our Lord's cousin from Mecca'. At once they ran and
untied a bundle from one of their saddles, and spread from it before
the two riding camels fodder of the green leaves and buds of the thorn
trees. They were used to gather this by striking the low bushes with a
heavy staff, till the broken tips of the branches rained down on a
cloth stretched over the ground beneath.

The young Sherif watched them contentedly. When his camel had fed, he
climbed slowly and without apparent effort up its neck into the saddle,
where he settled himself leisurely, and took an unctuous farewell of
us, asking God to requite the Arabs bountifully. They wished him a good
journey; and he started southward, while Abdulla brought our camels,
and we went off northward. Ten minutes later I heard a chuckle from old
Tafas, and saw wrinkles of delight between his grizzled beard and
moustache.

'What is upon you, Tafas?' said I.

'My Lord, you saw those two riders at the well?'

'The Sherif and his servant?'

'Yes; but they were Sherif Ali ibn el Hussein of Modhig, and his cousin,
Sherif Mohsin, lords of the Harith, who are blood enemies of the Masruh.
They feared they would be delayed or driven off the water if the Arabs
knew them. So they pretended to be master and servant from Mecca. Did you
see how Mohsin raged when Ali beat him? Ali is a devil. While only eleven
years old he escaped from his father's house to his uncle, a robber of
pilgrims by trade; and with him he lived by his hands for many months,
till his father caught him. He was with our lord Feisal from the first
day's battle in Medina, and led the Ateiba in the plains round Aar and
Bir Derwish. It was all camel-fighting; and Ali would have no man with him
who could not do as he did, run beside his camel, and leap with one hand
into the saddle, carrying his rifle. The children of Harith are children
of battle.' For the first time the old man's mouth was full of words.




CHAPTER XI



While he spoke we scoured along the dazzling plain, now nearly bare of
trees, and turning slowly softer under foot. At first it had been grey
shingle, packed like gravel. Then the sand increased and the stones
grew rarer, till we could distinguish the colours of the separate
flakes, porphyry, green schist, basalt. At last it was nearly pure
white sand, under which lay a harder stratum. Such going was like a
pile-carpet for our camels' running. The particles of sand were clean
and polished, and caught the blaze of sun like little diamonds in a
reflection so fierce, that after a while I could not endure it. I
frowned hard, and pulled the head-cloth forward in a peak over my eyes,
and beneath them, too, like a beaver, trying to shut out the heat which
rose in glassy waves off the ground, and beat up against my face.
Eighty miles in front of us, the huge peak of Rudhwa behind Yenbo was
looming and fading in THE dazzle of vapour which hid its foot. Quite
near in the plain rose the little shapeless hills of Hesna, which
seemed to block the way. To our right was the steep ridge of Beni Ayub,
toothed and narrow like a saw-blade, the first edge of the sheaf of
mountains between the Tehama and the high scarp of the tableland about
Medina. These Tareif Beni Ayub fell away on their north into a blue
series of smaller hills, soft in character, behind which lofty range
after range in a jagged stairway, red now the sun grew low, climbed up
to the towering central mass of Jebel Subh with its fantastic granite
spires.

A little later we turned to the right, off the pilgrim road, and took a
short cut across gradually rising ground of flat basalt ridges, buried
in sand till only their topmost piles showed above the surface. It held
moisture enough to be well grown over with hard wiry grass and shrubs
up and down the slopes, on which a few sheep and goats were pasturing.
There Tafas showed me a stone, which was the limit of the district of
the Masruh, and told me with grim pleasure that he was now at home, in
his tribal property, and might come off his guard.

Men have looked upon the desert as barren land, the free holding of
whoever chose; but in fact each hill and valley in it had a man who was
its acknowledged owner and would quickly assert the right of his family
or clan to it, against aggression. Even the wells and trees had their
masters, who allowed men to make firewood of the one and drink of the
other freely, as much as was required for their need, but who would
instantly check anyone trying to turn the property to account and to
exploit it or its products among others for private benefit. The desert
was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were
for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes
and no more. Logical outcomes were the reduction of this licence to
privilege by the men of the desert, and their hardness to strangers
unprovided with introduction or guarantee, since the common security
lay in the common responsibility of kinsmen. Tafas, in his own country,
could bear the burden of my safe-keeping lightly.

The valleys were becoming sharply marked, with clean beds of sand and
shingle, and an occasional large boulder brought down by a flood. There
were many broom bushes, restfully grey and green to the eye, and good
for fuel, though useless as pasture. We ascended steadily till we
rejoined the main track of the pilgrim road. Along this we held our way
till sunset, when we came into sight of the hamlet of Bir el Sheikh. In
the first dark as the supper fires were lighted we rode down its wide
open street and halted. Tafas went into one of the twenty miserable
huts, and in a few whispered words and long silences bought flour, of
which with water he kneaded a dough cake two inches thick and eight
inches across. This he buried in the ashes of a brushwood fire,
provided for him by a Subh woman whom he seemed to know. When the cake
was warmed he drew it out of the fire, and clapped it to shake off the
dust; then we shared it together, while Abdulla went away to buy
himself tobacco.

They told me the place had two stone-lined wells at the bottom of the
southward slope, but I felt disinclined to go and look at them, for the
long ride that day had tired my unaccustomed muscles, and the heat of
the plain had been painful. My skin was blistered by it, and my eyes
ached with the glare of light striking up at a sharp angle from the
silver sand, and from the shining pebbles. The last two years I had
spent in Cairo, at a desk all day or thinking hard in a little
overcrowded office full of distracting noises, with a hundred rushing
things to say, but no bodily need except to come and go each day
between office and hotel. In consequence the novelty of this change was
severe, since time had not been given me gradually to accustom myself
to the pestilent beating of the Arabian sun, and the long monotony of
camel pacing. There was to be another stage tonight, and a long day
to-morrow before Feisal's camp would be reached.

So I was grateful for the cooking and the marketing, which spent one
hour, and for the second hour of rest after it which we took by common
consent; and sorry when it ended, and we re-mounted, and rode in pitch
darkness up valleys and down valleys, passing in and out of bands of
air, which were hot in the confined hollows, but fresh and stirring in
the open places. The ground under foot must have been sandy, because
the silence of our passage hurt my straining ears, and smooth, for I
was always falling asleep in the saddle, to wake a few seconds later
suddenly and sickeningly, as I clutched by instinct at the saddle post
to recover my balance which had been thrown out by some irregular
stride of the animal. It was too dark, and the forms of the country
were too neutral, to hold my heavy-lashed, peering eyes. At length we
stopped for good, long after midnight; and I was rolled up in my cloak
and asleep in a most comfortable little sand-grave before Tafas had
done knee-haltering my camel.

Three hours later we were on the move again, helped now by the last
shining of the moon. We marched down Wadi Mared, the night of it dead,
hot, silent, and on each side sharp-pointed hills standing up black and
white in the exhausted air. There were many trees. Dawn finally came to
us as we passed out of the narrows into a broad place, over whose flat
floor an uneasy wind span circles, capriciously in the dust. The day
strengthened always, and now showed Bir ibn Hassani just to our right.
The trim settlement of absurd little houses, brown and white, holding
together for security's sake, looked doll-like and more lonely than the
desert, in the immense shadow of the dark precipice of Subh, behind.
While we watched it, hoping to see life at its doors, the sun was
rushing up, and the fretted cliffs, those thousands of feet above our
heads, became outlined in hard refracted shafts of white light against
a sky still sallow with the transient dawn.

We rode on across the great valley. A camel-rider, garrulous and old,
came out from the houses and jogged over to join us. He named himself
Khallaf, too friendly-like. His salutation came after a pause in a
trite stream of chat; and when it was returned he tried to force us
into conversation. However, Tafas grudged his company, and gave him
short answers. Khallaf persisted, and finally, to improve his footing,
bent down and burrowed in his saddle pouch till he found a small
covered pot of enamelled iron, containing a liberal portion of the
staple of travel in the Hejaz. This was the unleavened dough cake of
yesterday, but crumbled between the fingers while still warm, and
moistened with liquid butter till its particles would fall apart only
reluctantly. It was then sweetened for eating with ground sugar, and
scooped up like damp sawdust in pressed pellets with the fingers.

I ate a little, on this my first attempt, while Tafas and Abdulla
played at it vigorously; so for his bounty Khallaf went half-hungry:
deservedly, for it was thought effeminate by the Arabs to carry a
provision of food for a little journey of one hundred miles. We were
now fellows, and the chat began again while Khallaf told us about the
last fighting, and a reverse Feisal had had the day before. It seemed
he had been beaten out of Kheif in the head of Wadi Safra, and was now
at Hamra, only a little way in front of us; or at least Khallaf thought
he was there: we might learn for sure in Wasta, the next village on our
road. The fighting had not been severe; but the few casualties were all
among the tribesmen of Tafas and Khallaf; and the names and hurts of
each were told in order.

Meanwhile I looked about, interested to find myself in a new country.
The sand and detritus of last night and of Bir el Sheikh had vanished.
We were marching up a valley, from two hundred to five hundred yards in
width, of shingle and light soil, quite firm, with occasional knolls of
shattered green stone cropping out in its midst. There were many thorn
trees, some of them woody acacias, thirty feet and more in height,
beautifully green, with enough of tamarisk and soft scrub to give the
whole a charming, well kept, park-like air, now in the long soft
shadows of the early morning. The swept ground was so flat and clean,
the pebbles so variegated, their colours so joyously blended that they
gave a sense of design to the landscape; and this feeling was
strengthened by the straight lines and sharpness of the hills. They
rose on each hand regularly, precipices a thousand feet in height, of
granite-brown and dark porphyry-coloured rock, with pink stains; and by
a strange fortune these glowing hills rested on hundred-foot bases of
the cross-grained stone, whose unusual colour suggested a thin growth
of moss.

We rode along this beautiful place for about seven miles, to a low
watershed, crossed by a wall of granite slivers, now little more than a
shapeless heap, but once no doubt a barrier. It ran from cliff to
cliff, and even far up the hill-sides, wherever the slopes were not too
steep to climb. In the centre, where the road passed, had been two
small enclosures like pounds. I asked Khallaf the purpose of the wall.
He replied that he had been in Damascus and Constantinople and Cairo,
and had many friends among the great men of Egypt. Did I know any of
the English there? Khallaf seemed curious about my intentions and my
history. He tried to trip me in Egyptian phrases. When I answered in
the dialect of Aleppo he spoke of prominent Syrians of his
acquaintance. I knew them, too; and he switched off into local
politics, asking careful questions, delicately and indirectly, about
the Sherif and his sons, and what I thought Feisal was going to do. I
understood less of this than he, and parried inconsequentially. Tafas
came to my rescue, and changed the subject. Afterwards we knew that
Khallaf was in Turkish pay, and used to send frequent reports of what
came past Bir ibn Hassani for the Arab forces.

Across the wall we were in an affluent of Wadi Safra, a more wasted and
stony valley among less brilliant hills. It ran into another, far down
which to the west lay a cluster of dark palm-trees, which the Arabs
said was Jedida, one of the slave villages in Wadi Safra. We turned to
the right, across another saddle, and then downhill for a few miles to
a corner of tall cliffs. We rounded this and found ourselves suddenly
in Wadi Safra, the valley of our seeking, and in the midst of Wasta,
its largest village. Wasta seemed to be many nests of houses, clinging
to the hillsides each side the torrent-bed on banks of alluvial soil,
or standing on detritus islands between the various deep-swept channels
whose sum made up the parent valley.

Riding between two or three of these built-up islands, we made for the
far bank of the valley. On our way was the main bed of the winter
floods, a sweep of white shingle and boulders, quite flat. Down its
middle, from palm-grove on the one side to palm-grove on the other, lay
a reach of clear water, perhaps two hundred yards long and twelve feet
wide, sand-bottomed, and bordered on each brink by a ten-foot lawn of
thick grass and flowers. On it we halted a moment to let our camels put
their heads down and drink their fill, and the relief of the grass to
our eyes after the day-long hard glitter of the pebbles was so sudden
that involuntarily I glanced up to see if a cloud had not covered the
face of the sun.

We rode up the stream to the garden from which it ran sparkling in a
stone-lined channel; and then we turned along the mud wall of the
garden in the shadow of its palms, to another of the detached hamlets.
Tafas led the way up its little street (the houses were so low that
from our saddles we looked down upon their clay roofs), and near one of
the larger houses stopped and beat upon the door of an uncovered court.
A slave opened to us, and we dismounted in privacy. Tafas haltered the
camels, loosed their girths, and strewed before them green fodder from
a fragrant pile beside the gate. Then he led me into the guest-room of
the house, a dark clean little mud-brick place, roofed with half
palm-logs under hammered earth. We sat down on the palm-leaf mat which ran
along the dais. The day in this stifling valley had grown very hot; and
gradually we lay back side by side. Then the hum of the bees in the
gardens without, and of the flies hovering over our veiled faces
within, lulled us into sleep.




CHAPTER XII



Before we awoke, a meal of bread and dates had been prepared for us by
the people of the house. The dates were new, meltingly sweet and good,
like none I had ever tasted. The owner of the property, a Harbi, was,
with his neighbours, away serving Feisal; and his women and children
were tenting in the hills with the camels. At the most, the tribal
Arabs of Wadi Safra lived in their villages five months a year. For the
other seasons the gardens were entrusted to slaves, negroes like the
grown lads who brought in the tray to us, and whose thick limbs and
plump shining bodies looked curiously out of place among the birdlike
Arabs. Khallaf told me these blacks were originally from Africa,
brought over as children by their nominal Takruri fathers, and sold
during the pilgrimage, in Mecca. When grown strong they were worth from
fifty to eighty pounds apiece, and were looked after carefully as
befitted their price. Some became house or body servants with their
masters; but the majority were sent out to the palm villages of these
feverish valleys of running water, whose climate was too bad for Arab
labour, but where they flourished and built themselves solid houses,
and mated with women slaves, and did all the manual work of the
holding.

They were very numerous--for instance, there were thirteen villages of
them side by side in this Wadi Safra--so they formed a society of their
own, and lived much at their pleasure. Their work was hard, but the
supervision loose, and escape easy. Their legal status was bad, for
they had no appeal to tribal justice, or even to the Sherifs courts;
but public opinion and self-interest deprecated any cruelty towards
them, and the tenet of the faith that to enlarge a slave is a good
deed, meant in practice that nearly all gained freedom in the end. They
made pocket-money during their service, if they were ingenious. Those I
saw had property, and declared themselves contented. They grew melons,
marrows, cucumber, grapes and tobacco for their own account, in
addition to the dates, whose surplus was sent across to the Sudan by
sailing dhow, and there exchanged for corn, clothing and the luxuries
of Africa or Europe.

After the midday heat was passed we mounted again, and rode up the
clear, slow rivulet till it was hidden within the palm-gardens, behind
their low boundary walls of sun-dried clay. In and out between the tree
roots were dug little canals a foot or two deep, so contrived that the
stream might be let into them from the stone channel and each tree
watered in its turn. The head of water was owned by the community, and
shared out among the landowners for so many minutes or hours daily or
weekly according to the traditional use. The water was a little
brackish, as was needful for the best palms; but it was sweet enough in
the wells of private water in the groves. These wells were very
frequent, and found water three or four feet below the surface.

Our way took us through the central village and its market street.
There was little in the shops; and all the place felt decayed. A
generation ago Wasta was populous (they said of a thousand houses); but
one day there rolled a huge wall of water down Wadi Safra, the
embankments of many palm-gardens were breached, and the palm trees
swept away. Some of the islands on which houses had stood for centuries
were submerged, and the mud houses melted back again into mud, killing
or drowning the unfortunate slaves within. The men could have been
replaced, and the trees, had the soil remained; but the gardens had
been built up of earth carefully won from the normal freshets by years
of labour, and this wave of water--eight feet deep, running in a race
for three days--reduced the plots in its track to their primordial banks
of stones.

A little above Wasta we came to Kharma, a tiny settlement with rich
palm-groves, where a tributary ran in from the north. Beyond Kharma the
valley widened somewhat, to an average of perhaps four hundred yards,
with a bed of fine shingle and sand, laid very smooth by the winter
rains. The walls were of bare red and black rock, whose edges and
ridges were sharp as knife blades, and reflected the sun like metal.
They made the freshness of the trees and grass seem luxurious. We now
saw parties of Feisal's soldiers, and grazing herds of their saddle
camels. Before we reached Harhra every nook in the rocks or clump of
trees was a bivouac. They cried cheery greetings to Tafas, who came to
Me again, waving back and calling to them, while he pressed on quickly
to end his duty towards me.

Hamra opened on our left. It seemed a village of about one hundred
houses, buried in gardens among mounds of earth some twenty feet in
height. We forded a little stream, and went up a walled path between
trees to the top of one of these mounds, where we made our camels kneel
by the yard-gate of a long, low house. Tafas said something to a slave
who stood there with silver-hilted sword in hand. He led me to an inner
court, on whose further side, framed between the uprights of a black
doorway, stood a white figure waiting tensely for me. I felt at first
glance that this was the man I had come to Arabia to seek--the leader
who would bring the Arab Revolt to full glory. Feisal looked very tall
and pillar-like, very slender, in his long white silk robes and his
brown head-cloth bound with a brilliant scarlet and gold cord. His
eyelids were dropped; and his black beard and colourless face were like
a mask against the strange, still watchfulness of his body. His hands
were crossed in front of him on his dagger.

I greeted him. He made way for me into the room, and sat down on his
carpet near the door. As my eyes grew accustomed to the shade, they saw
that the little room held many silent figures, looking at me or at
Feisal steadily. He remained staring down at his hands, which were
twisting slowly about his dagger. At last he inquired softly how I had
found the journey. I spoke of the heat, and he asked how long from
Rabegh, commenting that I had ridden fast for the season.

'And do you like our place here in Wadi Safra?'

Well; but it is far from Damascus.'

The word had fallen like a sword in their midst. There was a quiver.
Then everybody present stiffened where he sat, and held his breath for
a silent minute. Some, perhaps, were dreaming of far off success:
others may have thought it a reflection on their late defeat. Feisal at
length lifted his eyes, smiling at me, and said, 'Praise be to God,
there are Turks nearer us than that'. We all smiled with him; and I
rose and excused myself for the moment.




CHAPTER XIII



Under tall arcades of palms with ribbed and groined branches, in a soft
meadow, I found the trim camp of Egyptian Army soldiers with Nafi Bey,
their Egyptian major, sent lately from the Sudan by Sir Reginald
Wingate to help the Arab rebellion. They comprised a mountain battery
and some machine-guns, and looked smarter than they felt. Nafi himself
was an amiable fellow, kind and hospitable to me in spite of weak
health and his resentment at having been sent so far away into the
desert to serve in an unnecessary and toilsome war.

Egyptians, being home-loving persons and comfortable, found strangeness
always a misery. In this bad instance they suffered hardship for a
philanthropic end, which made it harder. They were fighting the Turks,
for whom they had a sentimental regard, on behalf of the Arabs, an
alien people speaking a language kindred to their own, but appearing
therefore all the more unlike in character, and crude in life. The
Arabs seemed hostile to the material blessings of civilization rather
than appreciative of them. They met with a ribald hoot well-meaning
attempts to furnish their bareness.

Englishmen being sure of their own absolute excellence would persist in
help without grumbling overmuch; but the Egyptians lost faith. They had
neither that collective sense of duty towards their State, nor that
feeling of individual obligation to push struggling humanity up its
road. The vicarious policemanship which was the strongest emotion of
Englishmen towards another man's muddle, in their case was replaced by
the instinct to pass by as discreetly far as possible on the other
side. So, though all was well with these soldiers, and they had
abundant rations and good health and no casualties, yet they found
fault with the handling of the universe, and hoped this unexpected
Englishman had come to set it right.

Feisal was announced with Maulud el Mukhlus, the Arab zealot of Tekrit,
who, for rampant nationalism had been twice degraded in the Turkish
Army, and had spent an exile of two years in Nejd as a secretary with
ibn Rashid. He had commanded the Turkish cavalry before Shaiba, and had
been taken by us there. As soon as he heard of the rebellion of the
Sherif he had volunteered for him, and had been the first regular
officer to join Feisal. He was now nominally his A.D.C.

Bitterly he complained that they were in every way ill-equipped. This
was the main cause of their present plight. They got thirty thousand
pounds a month from the Sherif, but little flour and rice, little
barley, few rifles, insufficient ammunition, no machine-guns, no
mountain guns, no technical help, no information.

I stopped Maulud there and said that my coming was expressly to learn
what they lacked and to report it, but that I could work with them only
if they would explain to me their general situation. Feisal agreed, and
began to sketch to me the history of their revolt from its absolute
beginning.

The first rush on Medina had been a desperate business. The Arabs were
ill-armed and short of ammunition, the Turks in great force, since
Fakhri's detachment had just arrived and the troops to escort von
Stotzingen to Yemen were still in the town. At the height of the crisis
the Beni Ali broke; and the Arabs were thrust out beyond the walls. The
Turks then opened fire on them with their artillery; and the Arabs,
unused to this new arm, became terrified. The Ageyl and Ateiba got into
safety and refused to move out again. Feisal and Ali ibn el Hussein
vainly rode about in front of their men in the open, to show them that
the bursting shells were not as fatal as they sounded. The
demoralization deepened.

Sections of Beni Ali tribesmen approached the Turkish command with an
offer to surrender, if their villages were spared. Fakhri played with
them, and in the ensuing lull of hostilities surrounded the Awali
suburb with his troops: then suddenly he ordered them to carry it by
assault and to massacre every living thing within its walls. Hundreds
of the inhabitants were raped and butchered, the houses fired, and
living and dead alike thrown back into the flames. Fakhri and his men
had served together and had learned the arts of both the slow and the
fast kill upon the Armenians in the North.

This bitter taste of the Turkish mode of war sent a shock across
Arabia; for the first rule of Arab war was that women were inviolable:
the second that the lives and honour of children too young to fight
with men were to be spared: the third, that property impossible to
carry off should be left undamaged. The Arabs with Feisal perceived
that they were opposed to new customs, and fell back out of touch to
gain time to readjust themselves. There could no longer be any question
of submission: the sack of Awali had opened blood feud upon blood feud,
and put on them the duty of fighting to the end of their force: but it
was plain now that it would be a long affair, and that with muzzle-loading
guns for sole weapons, they could hardly expect to win.

So they fell back from the level plains about Medina into the hills
across the Sultani-road, about Aar and Raha and Bir Abbas, where they
rested a little, while Ali and Feisal sent messenger after messenger
down to Rabegh, their sea-base, to learn when fresh stores and money
and arms might be expected. The revolt had begun haphazard, on their
father's explicit orders, and the old man, too independent to take his
sons into his full confidence, had not worked out with them any
arrangements for prolonging it. So the reply was only a little food.
Later some Japanese rifles, most of them broken, were received. Such
barrels as were still whole were so foul that the too-eager Arabs burst
them on the first trial. No money was sent up at all: to take its place
Feisal filled a decent chest with stones, had it locked and corded
carefully, guarded on each daily march by his own slaves, and
introduced meticulously into his tent each night. By such theatricals
the brothers tried to hold a melting force.

At last Ali went down to Rabegh to inquire what was wrong with the
organization. He found that Hussein Mabeirig, the local chief, had made
up his mind that the Turks would be victorious (he had tried
conclusions with them twice himself and had the worst of it), and
accordingly decided theirs was the best cause to follow. As the stores
for the Sherif were landed by the British he appropriated them and
stored them away secretly in his own houses. Ali made a demonstration,
and sent urgent messages for his half-brother Zeid to join him from
Jidda with reinforcements. Hussein, in fear, slipped off to the hills,
an outlaw. The two Sherifs took possession of his villages. In them
they found great stores of arms, and food enough for their armies for a
month. The temptation of a spell of leisured ease was too much for
them: they settled down in Rabegh.

This left Feisal alone up country, and he soon found himself isolated,
in a hollow situation, driven to depend upon his native resources. He
bore it for a time, but in August took advantage of the visit of
Colonel Wilson to the newly-conquered Yenbo, to come down and give a
full explanation of his urgent needs. Wilson was impressed with him and
his story, and at once promised him a battery of mountain guns and some
maxims, to be handled by men and officers of the Egyptian Army garrison
in the Sudan. This explained the presence of Nafi Bey and his units.

The Arabs rejoiced when they came, and believed they were now equals of
the Turk; but the four guns were twenty-year-old Krupps, with a range
of only three thousand yards; and their crews were not eager enough in
brain and spirit for irregular fighting. However, they went foward with
the mob and drove in the Turkish outposts, and then their supports,
until Fakhri becoming seriously alarmed, came down himself, inspected
the front, and at once reinforced the threatened detachment at Bir
Abbas to some three thousand strong. The Turks had field guns and
howitzers with them, and the added advantage of high ground for
observation. They began to worry the Arabs by indirect fire, and nearly
dropped a shell on Feisal's tent while all the head men were conferring
within. The Egyptian gunners were asked to return the fire and smother
the enemy guns. They had to plead that their weapons were useless,
since they could not carry the nine thousand yards. They were derided;
and the Arabs ran back again into the defiles.

Feisal was deeply discouraged. His men were tired. He had lost many of
them. His only effective tactics against the enemy had been to chase in
suddenly upon their rear by fast mounted charges, and many camels had
been killed, or wounded or worn out in these expensive measures. He
demurred to carrying the whole war upon his own neck while Abdulla
delayed in Mecca, and Ali and Zeid at Rabegh. Finally he withdrew the
bulk of his forces, leaving the Harb sub-tribes who lived by Bir Abbas
to keep up pressure on the Turkish supply columns and communications by
a repeated series of such raids as those which he himself found
impossible to maintain.

Yet he had no fear that the Turks would again come forward against him
suddenly. His failure to make any impression on them had not imbued him
with the smallest respect for them. His late retirement to Hamra was
not forced: it was a gesture of disgust because he was bored by his
obvious impotence, and was determined for a little while to have the
dignity of rest.

After all, the two sides were still untried. The armament of the Turks
made them so superior at long range that the Arabs never got to grips.
For this reason most of the hand-to-hand fighting had taken place at
night, when the guns were blinded. To my ears they sounded oddly
primitive battles, with torrents of words on both sides in a
preliminary match of wits. After the foulest insults of the languages
they knew would come the climax, when the Turks in frenzy called the
Arabs 'English', and the Arabs screamed back 'German' at them. There
were, of course, no Germans in the Hejaz, and I was the first
Englishman; but each party loved cursing, and any epithet would sting
on the tongues of such artists.

I asked Feisal what his plans were now. He said that till Medina fell
they were inevitably tied down there in Hejaz dancing to Fakhri's tune.
In his opinion the Turks were aiming at the recapture of Mecca. The
bulk of their strength was now in a mobile column, which they could
move towards Rabegh by a choice of routes which kept the Arabs in
constant alarm. A passive defence of the Subh hills had shown that the
Arabs did not shine as passive resisters. When the enemy moved they
must be countered by an offensive.

Feisal meant to retire further yet, to the Wadi Yenbo border of the
great Juheina tribe. With fresh levies from them he would march
eastwards towards the Hejaz Railway behind Medina, at the moment when
Abdulla was advancing by the lava-desert to attack Medina from the
east. He hoped that Ah' would go up simultaneously from Rabegh, while
Zeid moved into Wadi Safra to engage the big Turkish force at Bir
Abbas, and keep it out of the main battle. By this plan Medina would be
threatened or attacked on all sides at once. Whatever the success of
the attack, the concentration from three sides would at least break up
the prepared Turkish push-outwards on the fourth, and give Rabegh and
the southern Hejaz a breathing space to equip themselves for effective
defence, or counter-attack.

Maulud, who had sat fidgeting through our long, slow talk, could no
longer restrain himself and cried out, 'Don't write a history of us.
The needful thing is to fight and fight and kill them. Give me a
battery of Schneider mountain guns, and machine-guns, and I will finish
this off for you. We talk and talk and do nothing.' I replied as
warmly; and Maulud, a magnificent fighter, who regarded a battle won as
a battle wasted if he did not show some wound to prove his part in it,
took me up. We wrangled while Feisal sat by and grinned delightedly at
us.

This talk had been for him a holiday. He was encouraged even by the
trifle of my coming; for he was a man of moods, flickering between
glory and despair, and just now dead-tired. He looked years older than
thirty-one; and his dark, appealing eyes, set a little sloping in his
face, were bloodshot, and his hollow cheeks deeply lined and puckered
with reflection. His nature grudged thinking, for it crippled his speed
in action: the labour of it shrivelled his features into swift lines of
pain. In appearance he was tall, graceful and vigorous, with the most
beautiful gait, and a royal dignity of head and shoulders. Of course he
knew it, and a great part of his public expression was by sign and
gesture.

His movements were impetuous. He showed himself hot-tempered and
sensitive, even unreasonable, and he ran off soon on tangents. Appetite
and physical weakness were mated in him, with the spur of courage. His
personal charm, his imprudence, the pathetic hint of frailty as the
sole reserve of this proud character made him the idol of his
followers. One never asked if he were scrupulous; but later he showed
that he could return trust for trust, suspicion for suspicion. He was
fuller of wit than of humour.

His training in Abdul Hamid's entourage had made him past-master in
diplomacy. His military service with the Turks had given him a working
knowledge of tactics. His life in Constantinople and in the Turkish
Parliament had made him familiar with European questions and manners.
He was a careful judge of men. If he had the strength to realize his
dreams he would go very far, for he was wrapped up in his work and
lived for nothing else; but the fear was that he would wear himself out
by trying to seem to aim always a little higher than the truth, or that
he would die of too much action. His men told me how, after a long
spell of fighting, in which he had to guard himself, and lead the
charges, and control and encourage them, he had collapsed physically
and was carried away from his victory, unconscious, with the foam
flecking his lips.

Meanwhile, here, as it seemed, was offered to our hand, which had only
to be big enough to take it, a prophet who, if veiled, would give
cogent form to the idea behind the activity of the Arab revolt. It was
all and more than we had hoped for, much more than our halting course
deserved. The aim of my trip was fulfilled.

My duty was now to take the shortest road to Egypt with the news: and
the knowledge gained that evening in the palm wood grew and blossomed
in my mind into a thousand branches, laden with fruit and shady leaves,
beneath which I sat and half-listened and saw visions, while the
twilight deepened, and the night; until a line of slaves with lamps
came down the winding paths between the palm trunks, and with Feisal
and Maulud we walked back through the gardens to the little house, with
its courts still full of waiting people, and to the hot inner room in
which the familiars were assembled; and there we sat down together to
the smoking bowl of rice and meat set upon the food-carpet for our
supper by the slaves.




CHAPTER XIV



So mixed was the company, Sherifs, Meccans, sheikhs of the Juheina and
Ateiba, Mesopotamians, Ageyl, that I threw apples of discord,
inflammatory subjects of talk amongst them, to sound their mettle and
beliefs without delay. Feisal, smoking innumerable cigarettes, kept
command of the conversation even at its hottest, and it was fine to
watch him do it. He showed full mastery of tact, with a real power of
disposing men's feelings to his wish. Storrs was as efficient; but
Storrs paraded his strength, exhibiting all the cleverness and
machinery, the movements of his hands which made the creatures dance.
Feisal seemed to govern his men unconsciously: hardly to know how he
stamped his mind on them, hardly to care whether they obeyed. It was as
great art as Storrs'; and it concealed itself, for Feisal was born to
it.

The Arabs loved him openly: indeed, these chance meetings made clear
how to the tribes the Sherif and his sons were heroic. Sherif Hussein
(Sayidna as they called him) was outwardly so clean and gentle-mannered
as to seem weak; but this appearance hid a crafty policy, deep
ambition, and an un-Arabian foresight, strength of character and
obstinacy. His interest in natural history reinforced his sporting
instincts, and made him (when he pleased) a fair copy of a Beduin
prince, while his Circassian mother had endowed him with qualities
foreign to both Turk and Arab, and he displayed considerable astuteness
in turning now one, now another of his inherited assets to present
advantage.

Yet the school of Turkish politics was so ignoble that not even the
best could graduate from it unaffected. Hussein when young had been
honest, outspoken . . . and he learned not merely to suppress his
speech, but to use speech to conceal his honest purpose. The art,
over-indulged, became a vice from which he could not free himself. In old
age ambiguity covered his every communication. Lake a cloud it hid his
decision of character, his worldly wisdom, his cheerful strength. Many
denied HIM such qualities: but history gave proof.

One instance of his worldly wisdom was the upbringing of his sons. The
Sultan had made them live in Constantinople to receive a Turkish
education. Sherif Hussein saw to it that the education was general and
good. When they came back to the Hejaz as young effendis in European
clothes with Turkish manners, the father ordered them into Arab dress;
and, to rub up their Arabic, gave them Meccan companions and sent them
out into the wilds, with the Camel Corps, to patrol the pilgrim roads.

The young men thought it might be an amusing trip, but were dashed when
their father forbade them special food, bedding, or soft-padded
saddles. He would not let them back to Mecca, but kept them out for
months in all seasons guarding the roads by day and by night, handling
every variety of man, and learning fresh methods of riding and
fighting. Soon they hardened, and became self-reliant, with that blend
of native intelligence and vigour which so often comes in a crossed
stock. Their formidable family group was admired and efficient, but
curiously isolated in their world. They were natives of no country,
lovers of no private plot of ground. They had no real confidants or
ministers; and no one of them seemed open to another, or to the father,
of whom they stood in awe.

The debate after supper was an animated one. In my character as a
Syrian I made sympathetic reference to the Arab leaders who had been
executed in Damascus by Jemal Pasha. They took me up sharply: the
published papers had disclosed that these men were in touch with
foreign Governments, and ready to accept French or British suzerainty
as the price of help. This was a crime against Arab nationality, and
Jemal had only executed the implied sentence. Feisal smiled, almost
winked, at me. 'You see,' he explained, 'we are now of necessity tied
to the British. We are delighted to be their friends, grateful for
their help, expectant of our future profit. But we are not British
subjects. We would be more at ease if they were not such
disproportionate allies.'

I told a story of Abdulla el Raashid, on the way up to Hamra. He had
groaned to me of the British sailors coming ashore each day at Rabegh.
'Soon they will stay nights, and then they will live here always, and
take the country.' To cheer him I had spoken of millions of Englishmen
now ashore in France, and of the French not afraid.

Whereat he had turned on me scornfully, asking if I meant to compare
France with the land of Hejazi?

Feisal mused a little and said, I am not a Hejazi by upbringing; and
yet, by God, I am jealous for it. And though I know the British do not
want it, yet what can I say, when they took the Sudan, also not wanting
it? They hunger for desolate lands, to build them up; and so, perhaps,
one day Arabia will seem to them precious. Your good and my good,
perhaps they are different, and either forced good or forced evil will
make a people cry with pain. Does the ore admire the flame which
transforms it? There is no reason for offence, but a people too weak
are clamant over their little own. Our race will have a cripple's
temper till it has found its feet.'

The ragged, lousy tribesmen who had eaten with us astonished me by
their familiar understanding of intense political nationality, an
abstract idea they could hardly have caught from the educated classes
of the Hejaz towns, from those Hindus, Javanese, Bokhariots, Sudanese,
Turks, out of sympathy with Arab ideals, and indeed just then suffering
A little from the force of local sentiment, springing too high after
its sudden escape from Turkish control. Sherif Hussein had had the
worldly wisdom to base his precepts on the instinctive belief of the
Arabs that they were of the salt of the earth and self-sufficient.
Then, enabled by his alliance with us to back his doctrine by arms and
money, he was assured of success.

Of course, this success was not level throughout. The great body of
Sherifs, eight hundred or nine hundred of them, understood his
nationalist doctrine and were his missionaries, successful missionaries
thanks to the revered descent from the Prophet, which gave them the
power to hold men's minds, and to direct their courses into the willing
quietness of eventual obedience.

The tribes had followed the smoke of their racial fanaticism. The towns
might sigh for the cloying inactivity of Ottoman rule: the tribes were
convinced that they had made a free and Arab Government, and that each
of them was It. They were independent and would enjoy themselves--a
conviction and resolution which might have led to anarchy, if they had
not made more stringent the family tie, and the bonds of
kin-responsibility. But this entailed a negation of central power. The
Sherif might have legal sovereignty abroad, if he hiked the high-sounding
toy; but home affairs were to be customary. The problem of the
foreign theorists--Is Damascus to rule the Hejaz, or can Hejaz rule
Damascus?' did not trouble them at all, for they would not have it set.
The Semites' idea of nationality was the independence of clans and
villages, and their ideal of national union was episodic combined
resistance to an intruder. Constructive policies, an organized state,
an extended empire, were not so much beyond their sight as hateful in
it. They were fighting to get rid of Empire, not to win it.

The feeling of the Syrians and Mesopotamians in these Arab armies was
indirect. They believed that by fighting in the local ranks, even here
in Hejaz, they were vindicating the general rights of all Arabs to
national existence; and without envisaging one State, or even a
confederation of States, they were definitely looking northward,
wishing to add an autonomous Damascus and Bagdad to the Arab family.
They were weak in material resources, and even after success would be,
since their world was agricultural and pastoral, without minerals, and
could never be strong in modern armaments. Were it otherwise, we should
have had to pause before evoking in the strategic centre of the Middle
East new national movements of such abounding vigour.

Of religious fanaticism there was little trace. The Sherif refused in
round terms to give a religious twist to his rebellion. His fighting
creed was nationality. The tribes knew that the Turks were Moslems, and
thought that the Germans were probably true friends of Islam. They knew
that the British were Christians, and that the British were their
allies. In the circumstances, their religion would not have been of
much help to them, and they had put it aside. 'Christian fights
Christian, so why should not Mohammedans do the same? What we want is a
Government which speaks our own language of Arabic and will let us live
in peace. Also we hate those Turks.'




CHAPTER XV



Next morning I was up early and out among Feisal's troops towards the
side of Kheif, by myself, trying to feel the pulse of their opinions in
a moment, by such tricks as those played upon their chiefs the night
before. Time was of the essence of my effort, for it was necessary to
gain in ten days the impressions which would ordinarily have been the
fruit of weeks of observing in my crab-fashion, that sideways-slipping
affair of the senses. Normally I would go along all day, with the
sounds immediate, but blind to every detail, only generally aware that
there were things red, or things grey, or clear things about me. To-day
my eyes had to be switched straight to my brain, that I might note a
thing or two the more clearly by contrast with the former mistiness.
Such things were nearly always shapes: rocks and trees, or men's bodies
in repose or movement: not small things like flowers, nor qualities
like colour.

Yet here was strong need of a lively reporter. In this drab war the
least irregularity was a joy to all, and McMahon's strongest course was
to exploit the latent imagination of the General Staff. I believed in
the Arab movement, and was confident, before ever I came, that in it
was the idea to tear Turkey into pieces; but others in Egypt lacked
faith, and had been taught nothing intelligent of the Arabs in the
field. By noting down something of the spirit of these romantics in the
hills about the Holy Cities I might gain the sympathy of Cairo for the
further measures necessary to help them.

The men received me cheerfully. Beneath every great rock or hush they
sprawled like lazy scorpions, resting from the heat, and refreshing
their brown limbs with the early coolness of the shaded stone. Because
of my khaki they took me for a Turk-trained officer who had deserted to
them, and were profuse in good-humoured but ghastly suggestions of how
they should treat me. Most of them were young, though the term
'fighting man' in the Hejaz meant anyone between twelve and sixty sane
enough to shoot. They were a tough-looking crowd, dark-coloured, some
negroid. They were physically thin, but exquisitely made, moving with
an oiled activity altogether delightful to watch. It did not seem
possible that men could be hardier or harder. They would ride immense
distances day after day, run through sand and over rocks bare-foot in
the heat for hours without pain, and climb their hills like goats.
Their clothing was mainly a loose shirt, with sometimes short cotton
drawers, and a head-shawl usually of red cloth, which acted towel or
handkerchief or sack as required. They were corrugated with bandoliers,
and fired joy-shots when they could.

They were in wild spirits, shouting that the war might last ten years.
It was the fattest time the hills had ever known. The Sherif was
feeding not only the fighting men, but their families, and paying two
pounds a month for a man, four for a camel. Nothing else would have
performed the miracle of keeping a tribal army in the field for five
months on end. It was our habit to sneer at Oriental soldiers' love of
pay; but the Hejaz campaign was a good example of the limitations of
that argument. The Turks were offering great bribes, and obtaining
little service--no active service. The Arabs took their money, and gave
gratifying assurances in exchange; yet these very tribes would be
meanwhile in touch with Feisal, who obtained service for his payment.
The Turks cut the throats of their prisoners with knives, as though
they were butchering sheep. Feisal offered a reward of a pound a head
for prisoners, and had many carried in to him unhurt. He also paid for
captured mules or rifles.

The actual contingents were continually shifting, in obedience to the
rule of flesh. A family would own a rifle, and the sons serve in turn
for a few days each. Married men alternated between camp and wife, and
sometimes a whole clan would become bored and take a rest. Consequently
the paid men were more than those mobilized; and policy often gave to
great sheikhs, as wages, money that was a polite bribe for friendly
countenance. Feisal's eight thousand men were one in ten camel-corps
and the rest hill-men. They served only under their tribal sheikhs, and
near home, arranging their own food and transport. Nominally each
sheikh had a hundred followers. Sherifs acted as group leaders, in
virtue of their privileged position, which raised them above the
jealousies which shackled the tribesmen.

Blood feuds were nominally healed, and really suspended in the
Sherifian area: Billi and Juheina, Ateiba and Ageyl living and fighting
side by side in Feisal's army. All the same, the members of one tribe
were shy of those of another, and within the tribe no man would quite
trust his neighbour. Each might be, usually was, wholehearted against
the Turk, but perhaps not quite to the point of failing to work off a
family grudge upon a family enemy in the field. Consequently they could
not attack. One company of Turks firmly entrenched in open country
could have defied the entire army of them; and a pitched defeat, with
its casualties, would have ended the war by sheer horror.

I concluded that the tribesmen were good for defence only. Their
acquisitive recklessness made them keen on booty, and whetted them to
tear up railways, plunder caravans, and steal camels; but they were too
free-minded to endure command, or to fight in team. A man who could
fight well by himself made generally a bad soldier, and these champions
seemed to me no material for our drilling; but if we strengthened them
by light automatic guns of the Lewis type, to be handled by themselves,
they might be capable of holding their hills and serving as an
efficient screen behind which we could build up, perhaps at Rabegh, an
Arab regular mobile column, capable of meeting a Turkish force
(distracted by guerilla warfare) on terms, and of defeating it
piecemeal. For such a body of real soldiers no recruits would be
forthcoming from Hejaz. It would have to be formed of the heavy
unwarlike Syrian and Mesopotamian towns-folk already in our hands, and
officered by Arabic-speaking officers trained in the Turkish army, men
of the type and history of Aziz el Masri or Maulud. They would
eventually finish the war by striking, while the tribesmen skirmished
about, and hindered and distracted the Turks by their pin-prick raids.

The Hejaz war, meanwhile, would be one of dervishes against regular
troops. It was the fight of a rocky, mountainous, barren country
(reinforced by a wild horde of mountaineers) against an enemy so
enriched in equipment by the Germans as almost to have lost virtue for
rough-and-tumble war. The hill-belt was a paradise for snipers; and
Arabs were artists in sniping. Two or three hundred determined men
knowing the ranges should hold any section of them; because the slopes
were too steep for escalade. The valleys, which were the only
practicable roads, for miles and miles were not so much valleys as
chasms or gorges, sometimes two hundred yards across, but sometimes
only twenty, full of twists and turns, one thousand or four thousand
feet deep, barren of cover, and flanked each side by pitiless granite,
basalt and porphyry, not in polished slopes, but serrated and split and
piled up in thousands of jagged heaps of fragments as hard as metal and
nearly as sharp.

It seemed to my unaccustomed eyes impossible that, without treachery on
the part of the mountain tribes, the Turks could dare to break their
way through. Even with treachery as an ally, to pass the hills would be
dangerous. The enemy would never be sure that the fickle population
might not turn again; and to have such a labyrinth of defiles in the
rear, across the communications, would be worse than having it in
front. Without the friendship of the tribes, the Turks would own only
the ground on which their soldiers stood; and lines so long and complex
would soak up thousands of men in a fortnight, and leave none in the
battle-front.

The sole disquieting feature was the very real success of the Turks in
frightening the Arabs by artillery. Aziz el Masri in the Turk-Italian
war in Tripoli had found the same terror, but had found also that it
wore off. We might hope that the same would happen here; but for the
moment the sound of a fired cannon sent every man within earshot behind
cover. They thought weapons destructive in proportion to their noise.
They were not afraid of bullets, not indeed overmuch of dying: just the
manner of death by shell-fire was unendurable. It seemed to me that
their moral confidence was to be restored only by having guns, useful
or useless, but noisy, on their side. From the magnificent Feisal down
to the most naked stripling in the army the theme was artillery,
artillery, artillery.

When I told them of the landing of the five-inch howitzers at Rabegh
they rejoiced. Such news nearly balanced in their minds the check of
their last retreat down Wadi Safra. The guns would be of no real use to
them: indeed, it seemed to me that they would do the Arabs positive
harm; for their virtues lay in mobility and intelligence, and by giving
them guns we hampered their movements and efficiency. Only if we did
not give them guns they would quit.

At these close quarters the bigness of the revolt impressed me. This
well-peopled province, from Una Lejj to Kunfida, more than a
fortnight's camel march, had suddenly changed its character from a rout
of casual nomad pilferers to an eruption against Turkey, fighting her,
not certainly in our manner, but fiercely enough, in spite of the
religion which was to raise the East against us in a holy war. Beyond
anything calculable in figures, we had let loose a passion of
anti-Turkish feeling which, embittered as it had been by generations of
subjection, might die very hard. There was among the tribes in the
fighting zone a nervous enthusiasm common, I suppose, to all national
risings, but strangely disquieting to one from a land so long delivered
that national freedom had become like the water in our mouths,
tasteless.

Later I saw Feisal again, and promised to do my best for him. My chiefs
would arrange a base at Yenbo, where the stores and supplies he needed
would be put ashore for his exclusive use. We would try to get him
officer-volunteers from among the prisoners of war captured in
Mesopotamia or on the Canal. We would form gun crews and machine-gun
crews from the rank and file in the internment camps, and provide them
with such mountain guns and light machine-guns as were obtainable in
Egypt. Lastly, I would advise that British Army officers,
professionals, be sent down to act as advisers and liaison officers
with him in the field.

This time our talk was of the pleasantest, and ended in warm thanks
from him, and an invitation to return as soon as might be. I explained
that my duties in Cairo excluded field work, but perhaps my chiefs
would let me pay a second visit later on, when his present wants were
filled and his movement was going forward prosperously. Meanwhile I
would ask for facilities to go down to Yenbo, for Egypt, that I might
get things on foot promptly. He at once appointed me an escort of
fourteen Juheina Sherifs, all kinsmen of Mohamed Ali ibn Beidawi, the
Emir of the Juheina. They were to deliver me intact in Yenbo to Sheikh
Abd el Kadir el Abdo, its Governor.




CHAPTER XVI



Leaving Hamra as dusk fell, we marched back down Wadi Safra until
opposite Kharma, where we turned to the right up the side valley. It
was closely grown with stiff brushwood, through which we drove our
camels strenuously, having tucked up the streamers of our saddle-bags
to save them from being shredded by the thorns. Two miles later we
began to climb the narrow pass of Dhifran, which gave evidence even by
night of labour expended on the road. It had been artificially
smoothed, and the stones piled at each side into a heavy wall of
protection against the rush of water in the rains. Parts had been
graded, and were at times carried on a causeway built seemingly six or
eight feet high, of great blocks of uncut stone: but it had been
breached at every turn by torrents, and was in terrible ruin.

The ascent lasted perhaps for a mile; and the steep descent on the
other side was about the same. Then we got to the level and found
ourselves in a much broken country of ridges, with an intricate net of
wadies whose main flow was apparently towards the south-west. The going
was good for our camels. We rode for about seven miles in the dark, and
came to a well, Bir el Murra, in a valley bed under a very low bluff,
on whose head the square courses of a small fort of ashlar stood out
against the starry sky. Conceivably both fort and causeway had been
built by an Egyptian Mameluke for the passage of his pilgrim-caravan
from Yenbo.

We halted there for the night, sleeping for six hours, a long luxury
upon the road, though this rest was broken twice by challenges from
half-seen mounted parties who had found our bivouac. Afterwards we
wandered among more small ridges until the dawn showed gentle valleys
of sand with strange hills of lava hemming us about. The lava here was
not the blue-black cinder-stone of the fields about Rabegh: it was
rust-coloured, and piled in huge crags of flowing surface and bent and
twisted texture, as though played with oddly while yet soft. The sand,
at first a carpet about the foot of the dolerite, gradually gained on
it. The hills got lower, with the sand banked up against them in
greater drifts, till even the crests were sand-spattered, and at last
drowned beyond sight. So, as the sun became high and painfully fierce,
we led out upon a waste of dunes, rolling southward for miles down hill
to the misty sea, where it lay grey-blue in the false distance of the
heat.

The dunes were narrow. By half-past seven we were on a staring plain of
glassy sand mixed with shingle, overspread by tall scrub and thorn
bushes, with some good acacia trees. We rode very fast across this,
myself in some discomfort; for I was not a skilled rider: the movement
exhausted me, while sweat ran down my forehead and dripped smartingly
into my gritty, sun-cracked eyelids. Sweat was actually welcome when a
drop fell from the end of a tuft of hair, to strike on the cheek cold
and sudden and unexpected like a splash, but these refreshments were
too few to pay for the pain of heat. We pressed on, while the sand
yielded to pure shingle, and that again hardened into the bed of a
great valley, running down by shallow, interwoven mouths towards the
sea.

We crossed over a rise, and from the far side opened a wide view, which
was the delta of Wadi Yenbo, the largest valley of Northern Hejaz. It
seemed a vivid copse of tamarisk and thorn. To the right, some miles up
the valley, showed darkly the palm-groves of Nakhi Mubarak, a village
and gardens of the Beni Ibrahim Juheina. In the distance, ahead of us,
lay the massive Jebel Rudhwa, brooding always so instantly over Yenbo,
though more than twenty miles away. We had seen it from Masturah, for
it was one of the great hills of Hejaz, the more wonderful because it
lifted itself in one clear edge from flat Tehama to crest. My
companions felt at home in its protection; so, as the plain was now
dancing with unbearable heat, we took shade under the branches of a
leafy acacia beside the path, and slumbered through the middle day.

In the afternoon we watered our camels at a brackish little water hole
in the sand bed of a branch watercourse, before a trim hedge of the
feathery tamarisk, and then pushed on for two more happy hours. At last
we halted for the night in typical Tehama country of bare slowly-swelling
sand and shingle ridges, with shallow valleys.

The Sherifs lit a fire of aromatic wood to bake bread and boil coffee;
and we slept sweetly with the salt sea air cool on our chafed faces. We
rose at two in the morning, and raced our camels over a featureless
plain of hard shingle and wet sand to Yenbo, which stood up with walls
and towers on a reef of coral rag twenty feet above our level. They
took me straight through the gates by crumbling, empty streets--Yenbo
had been half a city of the dead since the Hejaz Railway opened--to the
house of Abd el Kader, Feisal's agent, a well-informed, efficient,
quiet and dignified person, with whom we had had correspondence when he
was postmaster in Mecca, and the Survey in Egypt had been making stamps
for the new State. He had just been transferred here.

With Abd el Kader, in his picturesque rambling house looking over the
deserted square, whence so many Medina caravans had started, I stayed
four days waiting for the ship, which seemed as if it might fail me at
the rendezvous. However, at last the SUVA appeared, with Captain Boyle,
who took me back to Jidda. It was my first meeting with Boyle. He had
done much in the beginning of the revolt, and was to do much more for
the future: but I failed to make a good return impression. I was
travel-stained and had no baggage with me. Worst of all I wore a native
head-cloth, put on as a compliment to the Arabs. Boyle disapproved.

Our persistence in the hat (due to a misunderstanding of the ways of
heat-stroke) had led the East to see significance in it, and after long
thought their wisest brains concluded that Christians wore the hideous
thing that its broad brim might interpose between their weak eyes and
the uncongenial sight of God. So it reminded Islam continually that God
was miscalled and misliked by Christians. The British thought this
prejudice reprehensible (quite unlike our hatred of a head-cloth), one
to be corrected at any price. If the people would not have us hatted,
they should not have us any way. Now as it happened I had been educated
in Syria before the war to wear the entire Arab outfit when necessary
without strangeness, or sense of being socially compromised. The skirts
were a nuisance in running up stairs, but the head-cloth was even
convenient in such a climate. So I had accepted it when I rode inland,
and must now cling to it under fire of naval disapproval, till some
shop should sell me a cap.

In Jidda was the EURYALUS, with Admiral Wemyss, bound for Port Sudan
that Sir Rosslyn might visit Sir Reginald Wingate at Khartum. Sir
Reginald, as Sirdar of the Egyptian Army, had been put in command of
the British military side of the Arab adventure in place of Sir Henry
McMahon, who continued to direct its politics; and it was necessary for
me to see him, to impart my impressions to him. So I begged the Admiral
for a passage over sea, and a place in his train to Khartum. This he
readily granted, after cross-questioning me himself at length.

I found that his active mind and broad intelligence had engaged his
interest in the Arab Revolt from the beginning. He had come down again
and again in his flagship to lend a hand when things were critical, and
had gone out of his way twenty times to help the shore, which properly
was Army business. He had given the Arabs guns and machine-guns,
landing parties and technical help, with unlimited transport and naval
co-operation, always making a real pleasure of requests, and fulfilling
them in overflowing measure.

Had it not been for Admiral Wemyss' good will, and prescience, and the
admirable way in which Captain Boyle carried out his wishes, the
jealousy of Sir Archibald Murray might have wrecked the Sherifs
rebellion at its start. As it was, Sir Rosslyn Wemyss acted godfather
till the Arabs were on their feet; when he went to London; and Allenby,
coming out fresh to Egypt, found the Arabs a factor on his battle
front, and put the energies and resources of the Army at their
disposal. This was opportune, and a fortunate twist of the whirligig;
for Admiral Wemyss' successor in the naval command in Egypt was not
considered helpful by the other services, though apparently he treated
them no worse than he treated his own subordinates. A hard task, of
course, to succeed Wemyss.

In Port Sudan we saw two British officers of the Egyptian Army waiting
to embark for Rabegh. They were to command the Egyptian troops in
Hejaz, and to do their best to help Aziz el Masri organize the Arab
Regular Force which was going to end the war from Rabegh. This was my
first meeting with Joyce and Davenport, the two Englishmen to whom the
Arab cause owed the greater part of its foreign debt of gratitude.
Joyce worked for long beside me. Of Davenport's successes in the south
we heard by constant report.

Khartum felt cool after Arabia, and nerved me to show Sir Reginald
Wingate my long reports written in those days of waiting at Yenbo. I
urged that the situation seemed full of promise. The main need was
skilled assistance; and the campaign should go prosperously if some
regular British officers, professionally competent and speaking Arabic,
were attached to the Arab leaders as technical advisers, to keep us in
proper touch.

Wingate was glad to hear a hopeful view. The Arab Revolt had been his
dream for years. While I was at Khartum chance gave him the power to
play the main part in it; for the workings against Sir Henry McMahon
came to a head, were successful, and ended in his recall to England.
Sir Reginald Wingate was ordered down to Egypt in his stead. So after
two or three comfortable days in Khartum, resting and reading the MORTE
D'ARTHUR in the hospitable palace, I went down towards Cairo, feeling
that the responsible person had all my news. The Nile trip became a
holiday.

Egypt was, as usual, in the throes of a Rabegh question. Some
aeroplanes were being sent there; and it was being argued whether to
send a brigade of troops after them or not. The head of the French
Military Mission at Jidda, Colonel Bremond (Wilson's counterpart, but
with more authority; for he was a practising light in native warfare, a
success in French Africa, and an ex-chief of staff of a Corps on the
Somme) strongly urged the landing of Allied forces in Hejaz. To tempt
us he had brought to Suez some artillery, some machine-guns, and some
cavalry and infantry, all Algerian Moslem rank and file, with French
officers. These added to the British troops would give the force an
international flavour.

Bremond's specious appreciation of the danger of the state of affairs
in Arabia gained upon Sir Reginald. Wingate was a British General,
commander of a nominal expeditionary force, the Hejaz Force, which in
reality comprised a few liaison officers and a handful of storemen and
instructors. If Bremond got his way he would be G.O.C. of a genuine
brigade of mixed British and French troops, with all its pleasant
machinery of responsibility and despatches, and its prospect of
increment and official recognition. Consequently he wrote a guarded
despatch, half-tending towards direct interference.

As my experience of Arab feeling in the Harb country had given me
strong opinions on the Rabegh question (indeed, most of my opinions
were strong), I wrote for General Clayton, to whose Arab Bureau I was
now formally transferred, a violent memorandum on the whole subject.
Clayton was pleased with my view that the tribes might defend Rabegh
for months if lent advice and guns, but that they would certainly
scatter to their tents again as soon as they heard of the landing of
foreigners in force. Further, that the intervention-plans were
technically unsound, for a brigade would be quite insufficient to
defend the position, to forbid the neighbouring water-supplies to the
Turks, and to block their road towards Mecca. I accused Colonel Bremond
of having motives of his own, not military, nor taking account of Arab
interests and of the importance of the revolt to us; and quoted his
words and acts in Hejaz as evidence against him. They gave just
plausible colour to my charge.

Clayton took the memorandum to Sir Archibald Murray, who, liking its
acidity and force, promptly wired it all home to London as proof that
the Arab experts asking this sacrifice of valuable troops from him were
divided about its wisdom and honesty, even in their own camp. London
asked for explanations; and the atmosphere slowly cleared, though in a
less acute form the Rabegh question lingered for two months more.

My popularity with the Staff in Egypt, due to the sudden help I had
lent to Sir Archibald's prejudices, was novel and rather amusing. They
began to be polite to me, and to say that I was observant, with a
pungent style, and character. They pointed out how good of them it was
to spare me to the Arab cause in its difficulties. I was sent for by
the Commander-in-Chief, but on my way to him was intercepted by a
waiting and agitated aide, and led first into the presence of the Chief
of Staff, General Lynden Bell. To such an extent had he felt it his
duty to support Sir Archibald in his whimsies that people generally
confounded the two as one enemy. So I was astonished when, as I came
in, he jumped to his feet, leaped forward, and gripped me by the
shoulder, hissing, 'Now you're not to frighten him: don't you forget
what I say!'

My face probably showed bewilderment, for his one eye turned bland and
he made me sit down, and talked nicely about Oxford, and what fun
undergrads had, and the interest of my report of life in Feisal's
ranks, and his hope that I would go back there to carry on what I had
so well begun, mixing these amiabilities with remarks of how nervous
the Commander-in-Chief was, and how worried about everything, and the
need there was for me to give him a reassuring picture of affairs, and
yet not a rosy picture, since they could not afford excursions either
way.

I was hugely amused, inwardly, and promised to be good, but pointed out
that my object was to secure the extra stores and arms and officers the
Arabs needed, and how for this end I must enlist the interest, and, if
necessary (for I would stick at nothing in the way of duty), even the
excitement of the Commander-in-Chief; whereupon General Lynden Bell
took me up, saying that supplies were his part, and in them he did
everything without reference, and he thought he might at once, here and
now, admit his new determination to do all he could for us.

I think he kept his word and was fair to us thereafter. I was very
soothing to his chief.





BOOK TWO. Opening the Arab Offensive




CHAPTERS XVII TO XXVII



MY CHIEFS WERE ASTONISHED AT SUCH FAVOURABLE NEWS, BUT PROMISED HELP,
AND MEANWHILE SENT ME BACK, MUCH AGAINST MY WILL, INTO ARABIA. I
REACHED FEISAL'S CAMP ON THE DAY THE TURKS CARRIED THE DEFENCES OF
JEBEL SUBH. BY THEIR SO DOING THE ENTIRE BASIS OF MY CONFIDENCE IN A
TRIBAL WAR WAS DESTROYED.

WE HAVERED FOR A WHILE BY FENBO, HOPING TO RETRIEVE THE POSITION: BUT
THE TRIBESMEN PROVED TO BE USELESS FOR ASSAULT, AND WE SAW THAT IF THE
REVOLT WAS TO ENDURE WE MUST INVENT A NEW PLAN OF CAMPAIGN AT ONCE.

THIS WAS HAZARDOUS, AS THE PROMISED BRITISH MILITARY EXPERTS HAD NOT
YET ARRIVED. HOWEVER, WE DECIDED THAT TO REGAIN THE INITIATIVE WE MUST
IGNORE THE MAIN BODY OF THE ENEMY, AND CONCENTRATE FAR OFF ON HIS
RAILWAY FLANK. THE FIRST STEP TOWARDS THIS WAS TO MOVE OUR BASE TO
WEJH: WHICH WE PROCEEDED TO DO IN THE GRAND MANNER.




CHAPTER XVII



Clayton a few days later told me to return to Arabia and Feisal. This
being much against my grain I urged my complete unfitness for the job:
said I hated responsibility--obviously the position of a conscientious
adviser would be responsible--and that in all my We objects had been
gladder to me than persons, and ideas than objects. So the duty of
succeeding with men, of disposing them to any purpose, would be doubly
hard to me. They were not my medium: I was not practised in that
technique. I was unlike a soldier: hated soldiering. Of course, I had
read the usual books (too many books), Clausewitz and Jomini, Mahan and
Foch, had played at Napoleon's campaigns, worked at Hannibal's tactics,
and the wars of Belisarius, like any other man at Oxford; but I had
never thought myself into the mind of a real commander compelled to
fight a campaign of his own.

Last of all I reminded Clayton, relevantly, that the Sirdar had
telegraphed to London for certain regular officers competent to direct
the Arab war. The reply was that they might be months arriving, and
meanwhile Feisal must be linked to us, and his needs promptly notified
to Egypt. So I had to go; leaving to others the Arab Bulletin I had
founded, the maps I wished to draw, and the file of the war-changes of
the Turkish Army, all fascinating activities in which my training
helped me; to take up a role for which I felt no inclination. As our
revolt succeeded, onlookers have praised its leadership: but behind the
scenes lay all the vices of amateur control, experimental councils,
divisions, whimsicality.

My journey was to Yenbo, now the special base of Feisal's army, where
Garland single-handed was teaching the Sherifians how to blow up
railways with dynamite, and how to keep army stores in systematic
order. The first activity was the better. Garland was an enquirer in
physics, and had years of practical knowledge of explosives. He had his
own devices for mining trains and felling telegraphs and cutting
metals; and his knowledge of Arabic and freedom from the theories of
the ordinary sapper-school enabled him to teach the art of demolition
to unlettered Beduin in a quick and ready way. His pupils admired a man
who was never at a loss.

Incidentally he taught me to be familiar with high explosive. Sappers
handled it like a sacrament, but Garland would shovel a handful of
detonators into his pocket, with a string of primers, fuse, and fusees,
and jump gaily on his camel for a week's ride to the Hejaz Railway. His
health was poor and the climate made him regularly ill. A weak heart
troubled him after any strenuous effort or crisis; but he treated these
troubles as freely as he did detonators, and persisted till he had
derailed the first train and broken the first culvert in Arabia.
Shortly afterwards he died.

Things in Hejaz had changed a good deal in the elapsed month. Pursuing
his former plan, Feisal had moved to Wadi Yenbo, and was trying to make
safe his rear before going up to attack the railway in the grand
manner. To relieve him of the burdensome Harb tribes, his young
half-brother Zeid was on the way up from Rabegh to Wadi Safra, as a
nominal subordinate of Sherif Ali. The advanced Harb clans were
efficiently harrying the Turkish communications between Medina and Bir
Abbas. They sent in to Feisal nearly every day a little convoy of captured
camels, or rifles picked up after an engagement, or prisoners, or
deserters.

Rabegh, shaken by the first appearance of Turkish aeroplanes on
November the seventh, had been reassured by the arrival of a flight of
four British aeroplanes, B.E. machines, under Major Ross, who spoke
Arabic so adeptly and was so splendid a leader that there could be no
two minds as to the wise direction of his help. More guns came in week
by week, till there were twenty-three, mostly obsolete, and of fourteen
patterns. Ali had about three thousand Arab infantry; of whom two
thousand were regulars in khaki, under Aziz el Masri. With them were
nine hundred camel corps, and three hundred Egyptian troops. French
gunners were promised.

Sherif Abdulla had at last left Mecca, on November the twelfth. A
fortnight later he was much where he had meant to be, south, east, and
north-east of Medina, able to cut off its supplies from Kasim and
Kuweit. Abdulla had about four thousand men with him, but only three
machine-guns, and ten inefficient mountain guns captured at Taif and
Mecca. Consequently he was not strong enough to carry out his further
plan of a concerted attack on Medina with Ah' and Feisal. He could only
blockade it, and for this purpose posted himself at Henakiyeh, a desert
place, eighty miles north-east of Medina, where he was too far away to
be very useful.

The matter of the stores in the Yenbo base was being well bandied.
Garland had left the checking and issuing of them to Abd el Kader,
Feisal's governor, who was systematic and quick. His efficiency was a
great comfort to us, since it enabled us to keep our attention on more
active things. Feisal was organizing his peasants, his slaves, and his
paupers into formal battalions, an irregular imitation of the new model
army of Aziz at Rabegh. Garland held bombing classes, fired guns,
repaired machine-guns, wheels, and harness, and was armourer for them
all. The feeling was busy and confident.

Feisal, who had not yet acted on our reminders of the importance of
Wejh, was imagining an expedition of the Juheina to take it. Meanwhile
he was in touch with the Billi, the numerous tribe with headquarters in
Wejh, and he hoped for support from them. Their paramount Sheikh,
Suleiman Rifada, was temporizing, being really hostile; for the Turks
had made him Pasha and decorated him; but his cousin Hamid was in arms
for the Sherif, and had just captured a gratifying little caravan of
seventy camels on the way from El Ula, with stores for the Turkish
garrison of Wejh. As I was starting for Kheif Hussein to press the Wejh
plan again on Feisal, news came in of a Turkish repulse near Bir ibn
Hassani. A reconnaissance of their cavalry and camel corps had been
pushed too far into the hills, and the Arabs had caught it and
scattered it. Better and better yet.




CHAPTER XVIII



So I made a happy start with my sponsor for the journey, Sherif Abd el
Kerim el Beidawi, half-brother of Mohammed, Emir of the Juheina, but,
to my astonishment, of pure Abyssinian type. They told me later that
his mother had been a slave-girl married by the old Emir late in life.
Abd el Kerim was a man of middle height, thin and coal black, but
debonaire, twenty-six years old; though he looked less, and had only a
tiny tuft of beard on his sharp chin. He was restless and active,
endowed with an easy, salacious humour. He hated the Turks, who had
despised him for his colour (Arabs had little colour-feeling against
Africans: it was the Indian who evoked their race-dislike), and was
very merry and intimate with me. With him were three or four of his
men, all well mounted; and we had a rapid journey, for Abd el Kerim was
a famous rider who took pride in covering his stages at three times the
normal speed. It was not my camel, and the weather was cool and
clouded, with a taste of rain. So I had no objection.

After starting, we cantered for three unbroken hours. That had shaken
down our bellies far enough for us to hold more food, and we stopped
and ate bread and drank coffee till sunset, while Abd el Kerim rolled
about his carpet in a dog-fight with one of the men. When he was
exhausted he sat up; and they told stories and japed, till they were
breathed enough to get up and dance. Everything was very free, very
good-tempered, and not at all dignified.

When we re-started, an hour's mad race in the dusk brought us to the
end of the Tehama, and to the foot of a low range of rock and sand. A
month ago, coming from Hamra, we had passed south of this: now we
crossed it, going up Wadi Agida, a narrow, winding, sandy valley
between the hills. Because it had run in flood a few days earlier, the
going was firm for our panting camels; but the ascent was steep and we
had to take it at walking pace. This pleased me, but so angered Abd el
Kerim, that when, in a short hour, we reached the watershed he thrust
his mount forward again and led us at break-neck speed down hill in the
yielding night (a fair road, fortunately, with sand and pebbles
underfoot) for half an hour, when the land flattened out, and we came
to the outlying plantations of Nakhl Mubarak, chief date-gardens of the
southern Juheina.

As we got near we saw through the palm-trees flame, and the flame-lit
smoke of many fires, while the hollow ground re-echoed with the roaring
of thousands of excited camels, and volleying of shots or shoutings in
the darkness of lost men, who sought through the crowd to rejoin their
friends. As we had heard in Yenbo that the Nakhl were deserted, this
tumult meant something strange, perhaps hostile. We crept quietly past
an end of the grove and along a narrow street between man-high mud
walls, to a silent group of houses. Abd el Kerim forced the courtyard
door of the first on our left, led the camels within, and hobbled them
down by the walls that they might remain unseen. Then he slipped a
cartridge into the breech of his rifle and stole off on tiptoe down the
street towards the noise to find out what was happening. We waited for
him, the sweat of the ride slowly drying in our clothes as we sat there
in the chill night, watching.

He came back after half an hour to say that Feisal with his camel corps
had just arrived, and we were to go down and join him. So we led the
camels out and mounted; and rode in file down another lane on a bank
between houses, with a sunk garden of palms on our right. Its end was
filled with a solid crowd of Arabs and camels, mixed together in the
wildest confusion, and all crying aloud. We pressed through them, and
down a ramp suddenly into the bed of Wadi Yenbo, a broad, open space:
how broad could only be guessed from the irregular lines of watch-fires
glimmering over it to a great distance. Also it was very damp; with
slime, the relic of a shallow flood two days before, yet covering its
stones. Our camels found it slippery under foot and began to move
timidly.

We had no opportunity to notice this, or indeed anything, just now,
except the mass of Feisal's army, filling the valley from side to side.
There were hundreds of fires of thorn-wood, and round them were Arabs
making coffee or eating, or sleeping muffled like dead men in their
cloaks, packed together closely in the confusion of camels. So many
camels in company made a mess indescribable, couched as they were or
tied down all over the camping ground, with more ever coming in, and
the old ones leaping up on three legs to join them, roaring with hunger
and agitation. Patrols were going out, caravans being unloaded, and
dozens of Egyptian mules bucking angrily over the middle of the scene.

We ploughed our way through this din, and in an island of calm at the
very centre of the valley bed found Sherif Feisal. We halted our camels
by his side. On his carpet, spread barely over the stones, he was
sitting between Sherif Sharraf, the Kaimmakam both of the Imaret and of
Taif, his cousin, and Maulud, the rugged, slashing old Mesopotamian
patriot, now acting as his A.D.C. In front of him knelt a secretary
taking down an order, and beyond him another reading reports aloud by
the light of a silvered lamp which a slave was holding. The night was
windless, the air heavy, and the unshielded flame poised there stiff
and straight.

Feisal, quiet as ever, welcomed me with a smile until he could finish
his dictation. After it he apologized for my disorderly reception, and
waved the slaves back to give us privacy. As they retired with the
onlookers, a wild camel leaped into the open space in front of us,
plunging and trumpeting. Maulud dashed at its head to drag it away; but
it dragged him instead; and, its load of grass ropes for camel fodder
coming untied, there poured down over the taciturn Sharraf, the lamp,
and myself, an avalanche of hay. 'God be praised,' said Feisal gravely,
'that it was neither butter nor bags of gold.' Then he explained to me
what unexpected things had happened in the last twenty-four hours on
the battle front.

The Turks had slipped round the head of the Arab barrier forces in Wadi
Safra by a side road in the hills, and had cut their retreat. The Harb,
in a panic, had melted into the ravines on each side, and escaped
through them in parties of twos and threes, anxious for their
threatened families. The Turkish mounted men poured down the empty
valley and over the Dhifran Pass to Bir Said, where Ghalib Bey, their
commander, nearly caught the unsuspecting Zeid asleep in his tent.
However, warning came just in time. With the help of Sherif Abdulla ibn
Thawab, an old Harith campaigner, Emir Zeid held up the enemy attack
for long enough to get some of his tents and baggage packed on camels
and driven away. Then he escaped himself; but his force melted into a
loose mob of fugitives riding wildly through the night towards Yenbo.

Thereby the road to Yenbo was laid open to the Turks, and Feisal had
rushed down here only an hour before our arrival, with five thousand
men, to protect his base until something properly defensive could be
arranged. His spy system was breaking down: the Harb, having lost their
wits in the darkness, were bringing in wild and contradictory reports
from one side and another about the strength of the Turks and their
movements and intention. He had no idea whether they would strike at
Yenbo or be content with holding the passes from Wadi Yenbo into Wadi
Safra while they threw the bulk of their forces down the coast towards
Rabegh and Mecca. The situation would be serious either way: the best
that could happen would be if Feisal's presence here attracted them,
and caused them to lose more days trying to catch his field army while
we strengthened Yenbo. Meanwhile, he was doing all he could, quite
cheerfully; so I sat down and listened to the news; or to the
petitions, complaints and difficulties being brought in and settled by
him summarily.

Sharraf beside me worked a busy tooth-stick back and forward along his
gleaming jaws, speaking only once or twice an hour, in reproof of
too-urgent suitors. Maulud ever and again leaned over to me, round
Feisal's neutral body, eagerly repeating for our joint benefit any word of
a report which might be turned to favour the launching of an instant and
formal counter-attack.

This lasted till half-past four in the morning. It grew very cold as
the damp of the valley rose through the carpet and soaked our clothes.
The camp gradually stilled as the tired men and animals went one by one
to sleep; a white mist collected softly over them and in it the fires
became slow pillars of smoke. Immediately behind us, rising out of the
bed of mist, Jebel Rudhwa, more steep and rugged than ever, was brought
so close by the hushed moonlight that it seemed hanging over our heads.

Feisal at last finished the urgent work. We ate half-a-dozen dates, a
frigid comfort, and curled up on the wet carpet. As I lay there in a
shiver, I saw the Biasha guards creep up and spread their cloaks gently
over Feisal, when they were sure that he was sleeping.

An hour later we got up stiffly in the false dawn (too cold to go on
pretending and lying down) and the slaves lit a fire of palm-ribs to
warm us, while Sharraf and myself searched for food and fuel enough for
the moment. Messengers were still coming in from all sides with evil
rumours of an immediate attack; and the camp was not far off panic. So
Feisal decided to move to another position, partly because we should be
washed out of this one if it rained anywhere in the hills, and partly
to occupy his men's minds and work off their restlessness.

When his drums began to beat, the camels were loaded hurriedly. After
the second signal everyone leaped into the saddle and drew off to left
or right, leaving a broad lane up which Feisal rode, on his mare, with
Sharraf a pace behind him, and then Ali, the standard-bearer, a
splendid wild man from Nejd, with his hawk's face framed in long plaits
of jet-black hair falling downward from his temples. Ali was dressed
garishly, and rode a tall camel. Behind him were all the mob of sherifs
and sheikhs and slaves--and myself--pell-mell. There were eight hundred
in the bodyguard that morning.

Feisal rode up and down looking for a place to camp, and at last
stopped on the further side of a little open valley just north of Nakhl
Mubarak village; though the houses were so buried in the trees that few
of them could be seen from outside. On the south bank of this valley,
beneath some rocky knolls, Feisal pitched his two plain tents. Sharraf
had his personal tent also; and some of the other chiefs came and lived
by us. The guard put up their booths and shelters; and the Egyptian
gunners halted lower down on our side, and dressed their twenty tents
beautifully in line, to look very military. So in a little while we
were populous, if hardly imposing in detail.




CHAPTER XIX



We stayed here two days, most of which I spent in Feisal's company, and
so got a deeper experience of his method of command, at an interesting
season when the morale of his men was suffering heavily from the scare
reports brought in, and from the defection of the Northern Harb.
Feisal, fighting to make up their lost spirits, did it most surely by
lending of his own to everyone within reach. He was accessible to all
who stood outside his tent and waited for notice; and he never cut
short petitions, even when men came in chorus with their grief in a
song of many verses, and sang them around us in the dark. He listened
always, and, if he did not settle the case himself, called Sharraf or
Faiz to arrange it for him. This extreme patience was a further lesson
to me of what native headship in Arabia meant.

His self-control seemed equally great. When Mirzuk el Tikheimi, his
guest-master, came in from Zeid to explain the shameful story of their
rout, Feisal just laughed at him in public and sent him aside to wait
while he saw the sheikhs of the Harb and the Ageyl whose carelessness
had been mainly responsible for the disaster. These he rallied gently,
chaffing them for having done this or that, for having inflicted such
losses, or lost so much. Then he called back Mirzuk and lowered the
tent-flap: a sign that there was private business to be done. I thought
of the meaning of Feisal's name (the sword flashing downward in the
stroke) and feared a scene, but he made room for Mirzuk on his carpet,
and said, 'Come! tell us more of your 'nights' and marvels of the
battle: amuse us.' Mirzuk, a good-looking, clever lad (a little too
sharp-featured) falling into the spirit of the thing, began, in his
broad, Ateibi twang, to draw for us word-pictures of young Zeid in
flight; of the terror of Ibn Thawab, that famous brigand; and, ultimate
disgrace, of how the venerable el Hussein, father of Sherif Ali, the
Harithi, had lost his coffee-pots!

Feisal, in speaking, had a rich musical voice, and used it carefully
upon his men. To them he talked in tribal dialect, but with a curious,
hesitant manner, as though faltering painfully among phrases, looking
inward for the just word. His thought, perhaps, moved only by a little
in front of his speech, for the phrases at last chosen were usually the
simplest, which gave an effect emotional and sincere. It seemed
possible, so thin was the screen of words, to see the pure and the very
brave spirit shining out.

At other times he was full of humour--that invariable magnet of Arab
goodwill. He spoke one night to the Rifaa sheikhs when he sent them
forward to occupy the plain this side of Bir el Fagir, a tangled
country of acacia and tamarisk thickets on the imperceptible watershed
of the long depression uniting Bruka and Bir Said. He told them gently
that the Turks were coming on, and that it was their duty to hold them
up and give God the credit of their victory; adding that this would
become impossible if they went to sleep. The old men--and in Arabia
elders mattered more than youths--broke out into delighted speech, and,
after saying that God would give him a victory, or rather two
victories, capped their wishes with a prayer that his life might be
prolonged in the accumulation of an unprecedented number of victories.
What was better, they kept effective watch all night, in the strength
of his exhortation.

The routine of our life in camp was simple. Just before daybreak the
army Imam used to climb to the head of the little hill above the
sleeping army, and thence utter an astounding call to prayer. His voice
was harsh and very powerful, and the hollow, like a sounding-board,
threw echoes at the hills which returned them with indignant interest.
We were effectually roused, whether we prayed or cursed. As soon as he
ended, Feisal's Imam cried gently and musically from just outside the
tent. In a minute, one of Feisal's five slaves (all freed men, but
refusing discharge till it was their pleasure: since it was good and
not unprofitable to be my lord's servant) came round to Sharraf and
myself with sweetened coffee. Sugar for the first cup in the chill of
dawn was considered fit.

An hour or so later, the flap of Feisal's sleeping tent would be thrown
back: his invitation to callers from the household. There would be four
or five present; and after the morning's news a tray of breakfast would
be carried in. The staple of this was dates in Wadi Yenbo; sometimes
Feisal's Circassian grandmother would send him a box of her famous
spiced cakes from Mecca; and sometimes Hejris, the body slave, would
give us odd biscuits and cereals of his own trying. After breakfast we
would play with bitter coffee and sweet tea in alternation, while
Feisal's correspondence was dealt with by dictation to his secretaries.
One of these was Faiz el Ghusein the adventurous; another was the Imam,
a sad-faced person made conspicuous in the army by the baggy umbrella
hanging from his saddle-bow. Occasionally a man was given private
audience at this hour, but seldom; as the sleeping tent was strictly
for the Sherif s own use. It was an ordinary bell tent, furnished with
cigarettes, a camp-bed, a fairly good Kurd rug, a poor Shirazi, and the
delightful old Baluch prayer-carpet on which he prayed.

At about eight o'clock in the morning, Feisal would buckle on his
ceremonial dagger and walk across to the reception tent, which was
floored with two horrible kilims. Feisal would sit down at the end of
the tent facing the open side, and we with our backs against the wall,
in a semicircle out from him. The slaves brought up the rear, and
clustered round the open wall of the tent to control the besetting
suppliants who lay on the sand in the tent-mouth, or beyond, waiting
their turn. If possible, business was got through by noon, when the
Emir liked to rise.

We of the household, and any guests, then reassembled in the living
tent; and Hejris and Salem carried in the luncheon tray, on which were
as many dishes as circumstances permitted. Feisal was an inordinate
smoker, but a very light eater, and he used to make-believe with his
fingers or a spoon among the beans, lentils, spinach, rice, and sweet
cakes till he judged that we had had enough, when at a wave of his hand
the tray would disappear, as other slaves walked forward to pour water
for our fingers at the tent door. Fat men, like Mohammed Ibn Shefia,
made a comic grievance of the Emir's quick and delicate meals, and
would have food of their own prepared for them when they came away.
After lunch we would talk a little, while sucking up two cups of
coffee, and savouring two glasses full of syrup-like green tea. Then
till two in the afternoon the curtain of the living tent was down,
signifying that Feisal was sleeping, or reading, or doing private
business. Afterwards he would sit again in the reception tent till he
had finished with all who wanted him. I never saw an Arab leave him
dissatisfied or hurt--a tribute to his tact and to his memory; for he
seemed never to halt for loss of a fact, nor to stumble over a
relationship.

If there were time after second audience, he would walk with his
friends, talking of horses or plants, looking at camels, or asking
someone the names of the visible land features. The sunset prayer was
at times public, though Feisal was not outwardly very pious. After it
he saw people individually in the living tent, planning the night's
reconnaissances and patrols--for most of the field-work was done after
dark. Between six and seven there was brought in the evening meal, to
which all present in headquarters were called by the slaves. It
resembled the lunch, except the cubes of boiled mutton were sorted
through the great tray of rice, MEDFA EL SUHUR, the mainstay of
appetite. We observed silence till all had eaten.

This meal ended our day, save for the stealthy offering by a barefooted
slave of a tray of tea-glasses at protracted intervals. Feisal did not
sleep till very late, and never betrayed a wish to hasten our going. In
the evening he relaxed as far as possible and avoided avoidable work.
He would send out for some local sheikh to tell stories of the
district, and histories of the tribe and its genealogy; or the tribal
poets would sing us their war narratives: long traditional forms with
stock epithets, stock sentiments, stock incidents grafted afresh on the
efforts of each generation. Feisal was passionately fond of Arabic
poetry, and would often provoke recitations, judging and rewarding the
best verses of the night. Very rarely he would play chess, with the
unthinking directness of a fencer, and brilliantly. Sometimes, perhaps
for my benefit, he told stories of what he had seen in Syria, and
scraps of Turkish secret history, or family affairs. I learned much of
the men and parties in the Hejaz from his lips.




CHAPTER XX



Suddenly Feisal asked me if I would wear Arab clothes like his own
while in the camp. I should find it better for my own part, since it
was a comfortable dress in which to live Arab-fashion as we must do.
Besides, the tribesmen would then understand how to take me. The only
wearers of khaki in their experience had been Turkish officers, before
whom they took up an instinctive defence. If I wore Meccan clothes,
they would behave to me as though I were really one of the leaders; and
I might slip in and out of Feisal's tent without making a sensation
which he had to explain away each time to strangers. I agreed at once,
very gladly; for army uniform was abominable when camel-riding or when
sitting about on the ground; and the Arab things, which I had learned
to manage before the war, were cleaner and more decent in the desert.
Hejris was pleased, too, and exercised his fancy in fitting me out in
splendid white silk and gold-embroidered wedding garments which had
been sent to Feisal lately (was it a hint?) by his great-aunt in Mecca.
I took a stroll in the new looseness of them round the palm-gardens of
Mubarak and Bruka, to accustom myself to their feel.

These villages were pleasant little places, built of mud brick on the
high earth mounds encircling the palm-gardens. Nakhl Mubarak lay to the
north, and Bruka just south of it across a thorny valley. The houses
were small, mud-washed inside, cool, and very clean, furnished with a
mat or two, a coffee mortar, and food pots and trays. The narrow
streets were shaded by an occasional well-grown tree. The earth
embankments round the cultivated areas were sometimes fifty feet in
height, and had been for the most part artificially formed from the
surplus earth dug out between the trees, from household rubbish and
from stones gathered out of the Wadi.

The banks were to defend the crops from flood. Wadi Yenbo otherwise
would soon have filled the gardens, since these, to be irrigable, must
be below the valley floor. The narrow plots were divided by fences of
palm-ribs or by mud walls, with narrow streams of sweet water in raised
channels round them. Each garden gate was over water, with a bridge of
three or four parallel palm-logs built up to it for the passage of
donkeys or camels. Each plot had a mud sluice, scooped away when its
turn for watering came. The palms, regularly planted in ordered lines
and well cared for, were the main crop; but between them were grown
barley, radishes, marrows, cucumbers, tobacco and henna. Villages
higher up Wadi Yenbo were cool enough to grow grapes.

Feisal's stand in Nakhl Mubarak could in the nature of things only be a
pause, and I felt that I had better get back to Yenbo, to think
seriously about our amphibious defence of this port, the Navy having
promised its every help. We settled that I should consult Zeid, and act
with him as seemed best. Feisal gave me a magnificent bay camel for the
trip back. We marched through the Agida hills by a new road, Wadi
Messarih, because of a scare of Turkish patrols on the more direct
line. Bedr ibn Shefia was with me; and we did the distance gently in a
single stage of six hours, getting to Yenbo before dawn. Being tired
after three strenuous days of little sleep among constant alarms and
excitements I went straight to Garland's empty house (he was living on
board ship in the harbour) and fell asleep on a bench; but afterwards I
was called out again by the news that Sherif Zeid was coming, and went
down to the walls to see the beaten force ride in.

There were about eight hundred of them, quiet, but in no other way
mortified by their shame. Zeid himself seemed finely indifferent. As he
entered the town he turned and cried to Abd el Kadir, the Governor,
riding behind him, Why, your town is ruinous! I must telegraph to my
father for forty masons to repair the public buildings.' And this
actually he did. I had telegraphed to Captain Boyle that Yenbo was
gravely threatened, and Boyle at once replied that his fleet would be
there in time, if not sooner. This readiness was an opportune
consolation: worse news came along next day. The Turks, by throwing a
strong force forward from Bir Said against Nakhl Mubarak, had closed
with Feisal's levies while they were yet unsteady. After a short fight,
Feisal had broken off, yielded his ground, and was retreating here. Our
war seemed entering its last act. I took my camera, and from the
parapet of the Medina gate got a fine photograph of the brothers coming
in. Feisal had nearly two thousand men with him, but none of the
Juheina tribesmen. It looked like treachery and a real defection of the
tribes, things which both of us had ruled out of court as impossible.

I called at once at his house and he told me the history. The Turks had
come on with three battalions and a number of mule-mounted infantry and
camelry. Their command was in the hands of Ghalib Bey, who handled his
troops with great keenness, acting as he did under the eye of the Corps
Commander. Fakhru Pasha privately accompanied the expedition, whose
guide and go-between with the Arabs was Dakhil-Allah el Kadhi, the
hereditary law-giver of the Juheina, a rival of Sherif Mohammed Ali el
Beidawi, and after him the second man in the tribe.

They got across Wadi Yenbo to the groves of Bruka in their first onset,
and thus threatened the Arab communications with Yenbo. They were also
able to shell Nakhl Mubarak freely with their seven guns. Feisal was
not a whit dismayed, but threw out the Juheina on his left to work down
the great valley. His centre and right he kept in Nakhl Mubarak, and he
sent the Egyptian artillery to take post in Jebel Agida, to deny that
to the Turks. Then he opened fire on Bruka with his own two
fifteen-pounders.

Rasim, a Syrian officer, formerly a battery commander in the Turkish
Army, was fighting these two guns; and he made a great demonstration
with them. They had been sent down as a gift from Egypt, anyhow, old
rubbish thought serviceable for the wild Arabs, just as the sixty
thousand rifles supplied the Sherif were condemned weapons, relics of
the Gallipoli campaign. So Rasim had no sights, nor range-finder, no
range tables, no high explosive.

His distance might have been six thousand yards; but the fuses of his
shrapnel were Boer War antiquities, full of green mould, and, if they
burst, it was sometimes short in the air, and sometimes grazing.
However, he had no means of getting his ammunition away if things went
wrong, so he blazed off at speed, shouting with laughter at this
fashion of making war; and the tribesmen seeing the commandant so merry
took heart of grace themselves. 'By God,' said one, 'those are the real
guns: the Importance of their noise!' Rasim swore that the Turks were
dying in heaps; and the Arabs charged forward warmly, at his word.

Things were going well; and Feisal had the hope of a decisive success
when suddenly his left wing in the valley wavered, halted; finally it
turned its back on the enemy and retired tumultuously to the camping
ground. Feisal, in the centre, galloped to Rasim and cried that the
Juheina had broken and he was to save the guns. Rasim yoked up the
teams and trotted away to Wadi Agida, wherein the Egyptians were taking
counsel avidly with one another. After him streamed the Ageyl and the
Atban, the men of Ibn Shefia, the Harb and Biasha. Feisal and his
household composed the rear, and in deliberate procession they moved
down towards Yenbo, leaving the Juheina with the Turks on the
battlefield.

As I was still hearing of this sad end, and cursing with him the
traitor Beidawi brothers, there was a stir about the door, and Abd el
Kerim broke through the slaves, swung up to the dais, kissed Feisal's
head-rope in salutation, and sat down beside us. Feisal with a gasping
stare at him said, 'How?' and Abd el Kerim explained their dismay at
the sudden flight of Feisal, and how he with his brother and their
gallant men had fought the Turks for the whole night, alone, without
artillery, till the palm-groves became untenable and they too had been
driven through Wadi Agida. His brother, with half the manhood of the
tribe, was just entering the gate. The others had fallen back up Wadi
Yenbo for water.

'And why did you retire to the camp-ground behind us during the
battle?' asked Feisal. 'Only to make ourselves a cup of coffee,' said
Abd el Kerim. We had fought from sunrise and it was dusk: we were very
tired and thirsty.' Feisal and I lay back and laughed: then we went to
see what could be done to save the town.

The first step was simple. We sent all the Juheina back to Wadi Yenbo
with orders to mass at Kheif, and keep up a steady pressure on the
Turkish line of communications. They were also to push sniping parties
down the Agida hills. This diversion would hold up so many of the Turks
that they would be unable to bring against Yenbo a force superior in
number to the defenders, who in addition had the advantage of a good
position. The town on the top of its flat reef of coral rose perhaps
twenty feet above the sea, and was compassed by water on two sides. The
other two sides looked over flat stretches of sand, soft in places,
destitute of cover for miles, and with no fresh water upon them
anywhere. In daylight, if defended by artillery and machine-gun fire,
they should be impregnable.

The artillery was arriving every minute; for Boyle, as usual far better
than his word, had concentrated five ships on us in less than twenty-four
hours. He put the monitor M.31, whose shallow draught fitted her
for the job, in the end of the south-eastern creek of the harbour,
whence she could rake the probable direction of a Turkish advance with
her six-inch guns. Crocker, her captain, was very anxious to let off
those itching guns. The larger ships were moored to fire over the town
at longer range, or to rake the other flank from the northern harbour.
The searchlights of DUFFERIN and M.31 crossed on the plain beyond the
town.

The Arabs, delighted to count up the quantity of vessels in the
harbour, were prepared to contribute their part to the night's
entertainment. They gave us good hope there would be no further panic:
but to reassure them fully they needed some sort of rampart to defend,
mediaeval fashion: it was no good digging trenches, partly because the
ground was coral rock, and, besides, they had no experience of trenches
and might not have manned them confidently. So we took the crumbling,
salt-riddled wall of the place, doubled it with a second, packed earth
between the two, and raised them till our sixteenth-century bastions
were rifle-proof at least, and probably proof against the Turkish
mountain guns. Outside the bastions we put barbed wire, festooned
between cisterns on the rain catchments beyond the walls. We dug in
machine-gun nests in the best angles, and manned them with Feisal's
regular gunners. The Egyptians, like everyone else given a place in the
scheme, were gratifyingly happy. Garland was engineer-in-chief and
chief adviser.

After sun-down the town quivered with suppressed excitement. So long as
the day lasted there had been shouts and joy-shots and wild bursts of
frenzy among the workmen; but when dark came they went back to feed and
a hush fell. Nearly everyone sat up that night. There was one alarm
about eleven o'clock. Our outposts had met the enemy only three miles
outside the town. Garland, with a crier, went through the few streets,
and called the garrison. They tumbled straight out and went to their
places in dead silence without a shot or a loose shout. The seamen on
the minaret sent warning to the ships, whose combined searchlights
began slowly to traverse the plain in complex intersections, drawing
pencils of wheeling light across the flats which the attacking force
must cross. However, no sign was made and no cause given us to open
fire.

Afterwards, old Dakhil Allah told me he had guided the Turks down to
rush Yenbo in the dark that they might stamp out Feisal's army once for
all; but their hearts had failed them at the silence and the blaze of
lighted ships from end to end of the harbour, with the eerie beams of
the searchlights revealing the bleakness of the glacis they would have
to cross. So they turned back: and that night, I believe, the Turks
lost their war. Personally, I was on the SUVA, to be undisturbed, and
sleeping splendidly at last; so I was grateful to Dakhil Allah for the
prudence which he preached the Turks, as though we might perhaps have
won a glorious victory, I was ready to give much more for just that
eight hours' unbroken rest.




CHAPTER XXI



Next day the crisis had passed: the Turks had clearly failed. The
Juheina were active in their flank position from Wadi Yenbo. Garland's
architectural efforts about the town became impressive. Sir Archibald
Murray, to whom Feisal had appealed for a demonstration in Sinai to
prevent further withdrawals of Turks for service at Medina, sent back
an encouraging reply, and everybody was breathing easily. A few days
later Boyle dispersed the ships, promising another lightning
concentration upon another warning; and I took the opportunity to go
down to Rabegh, where I met Colonel Bremond, the great bearded chief of
the French Military Mission, and the only real soldier in Hejaz. He was
still using his French detachment in Suez as a lever to move a British
Brigade into Rabegh; and, since he suspected I was not wholly of his
party, he made an effort to convert me.

In the course of the argument which followed, I said something about
the need of soon attacking Medina; for, with the rest of the British, I
believed that the fall of Medina was a necessary preliminary to any
further progress of the Arab Revolt. He took me up sharply, saying that
it was in no wise proper for the Arabs to take Medina. In his view, the
Arab Movement had attained its maximum utility by the mere rebellion in
Mecca; and military operations against Turkey were better in the
unaided hands of Great Britain and France. He wished to land Allied
troops at Rabegh, because it would quench the ardour of the tribes by
making the Sherif suspect in their eyes. The foreign troops would then
be his main defence, and his preservation be our work and option, until
at the end of the war, when Turkey was defeated, the victorious Powers
could extract Medina by treaty from the Sultan, and confer it upon
Hussein, with the legal sovereignty of Hejaz, as his rewards for
faithful service.

I had not his light confidence in our being strong enough to dispense
with small allies; so I said shortly that my opinions were opposed to
his. I laid the greatest weight on the immediate conquest of Medina,
and was advising Feisal to seize Wejh, in order to prolong his threat
against the railway. In sum, to my mind, the Arab Movement would not
justify its creation if the enthusiasm of it did not carry the Arabs
into Damascus.

This was unwelcome to him; for the Sykes-Picot Treaty of 1916 between
France and England had been drawn by Sykes for this very eventuality;
and, to reward it, stipulated the establishment of independent Arab
states in Damascus, Aleppo and Mosul, districts which would otherwise
fall to the unrestricted control of France. Neither Sykes nor Picot had
believed the thing really possible; but I knew that it was, and
believed that after it the vigour of the Arab Movement would prevent
the creation--by us or others--in Western Asia of unduly 'colonial'
schemes of exploitation.

Bremond took refuge in his technical sphere, and assured me, on his
honour as a staff-officer, that for Feisal to leave Yenbo and go to
Wejh was military suicide; but I saw no force in the arguments which he
threw at me volubly; and told him so. It was a curious interview, that,
between an old soldier and a young man in fancy dress; and it left a
bad taste in my mouth. The Colonel, like his countrymen, was a realist
in love, and war. Even in situations of poetry the French remained
incorrigible prose-writers, seeing by the directly-thrown light of
reason and understanding, not through the half-closed eye, mistily, by
things' essential radiance, in the manner of the imaginative British:
so the two races worked ill together on a great undertaking. However, I
controlled myself enough not to tell any Arab of the conversation, but
sent a full account of it to Colonel Wilson, who was shortly coming up
to see Feisal for a discussion of the Wejh prospect in all its
bearings.

Before Wilson arrived the centre of Turkish gravity changed abruptly.
Fakhri Pashi had seen the hopelessness of attacking Yenbo, or of
driving after the intangible Juheina in Kheif Hussein. Also he was
being violently bombed in Nakhl Mubarak itself by a pair of British
seaplanes which did hardy flights over the desert and got well into the
enemy on two occasions, despite their shrapnel.

Consequently he decided to fall back in a hurry on Bir Said, leaving a
small force there to check the Juheina, and to move down the Sultani
road towards Rabegh with the bulk of his men. These changes were no
doubt partly impelled by the unusual vigour of Ali at Rabegh. As soon
as Ali had heard of Zeid's defeat he had sent him reinforcements and
guns; and when Feisal himself collapsed he decided to move north with
all his army, to attack the Turks in Wadi Safra and draw them off
Yenbo. Ah' had nearly seven thousand men; and Feisal felt that if the
move was synchronized with one on his part, Fakhri's force might be
crushed between them in the hills. He telegraphed, suggesting this,
asking for a delay of a few days till his shaken men were ready.

Ali was strung up and would not wait. Feisal therefore rushed Zeid out
to Masahali in Wadi Yenbo to make preparations. When these were
complete he sent Zeid on to occupy Bir Said, which was done
successfully. He then ordered the Juheina forward in support. They
demurred; for ibn Beidawi was jealous of Feisal's growing power among
his tribes, and wanted to keep himself indispensable. Feisal rode
unattended to Nakhl Mubarak, and in one night convinced the Juheina
that he was their leader. Next morning they were all moving, while he
went on to collect the northern Harb on the Tasha Pass to interrupt the
Turkish retreat in Wadi Safra. He had nearly six thousand men; and if
Ali took the southern bank of the valley the weak Turks would be
between two fires.

Unfortunately it did not happen. When actually on the move he heard
from Ali that, after a peaceful recovery of Bir ibn Hassani, his men
had been shaken by false reports of disloyalty among the Subh, and had
fallen back in rapid disorder to Babegh.

In this ominous pause Colonel Wilson came up to Yenbo to persuade us of
the necessity of an immediate operation against Wejh. An amended plan
had been drawn up whereby Feisal would take the whole force of the
Juheina, and his permanent battalions, against Wejh with the maximum of
naval help. This strength would make success reasonably sure, but it
left Yenbo empty and defenceless. For the moment Feisal dreaded
incurring such a risk. He pointed out, not unreasonably, that the Turks
in his neighbourhood were still mobile; that Ali's force had proved
hollow, unlikely to defend even Babegh against serious attack; and
that, as Babegh was the bulwark of Mecca, sooner than see it lost he
must throw away Yenbo and ferry himself and men thither to die fighting
on its beach.

To reassure him, Wilson painted the Babegh force in warm colours.
Feisal checked his sincerity by asking for his personal word that the
Babegh garrison, with British naval help, would resist enemy attack
till Wejh fell. Wilson looked for support round the silent deck of the
DUFFERIN (on which we were conferring), and nobly gave the required
assurance: a wise gamble, since without it Feisal would not move; and
this diversion against Wejh, the only offensive in the Arabs' power,
was their last chance not so much of securing a convincing siege of
Medina, as of preventing the Turkish capture of Mecca. A few days later
he strengthened himself by sending Feisal direct orders from his
father, the Sherif, to proceed to Wejh at once, with all his available
troops.

Meanwhile the Babegh situation grew worse. The enemy in Wadi Safra and
the Sultani road were estimated at nearly five thousand men. The Harb
of the north were suppliant to them for preservation of their palm-groves.
The Harb of the south, those of Hussein Mabeirig, notoriously
waited their advance to attack the Sherifians in the rear. At a
conference of Wilson, Bremond, Joyce, Boss and others, held in Babegh
on Christmas Eve, it was decided to lay out on the beach by the
aerodrome a small position, capable of being held under the ship's guns
by the Egyptians, the Flying Corps and a seamen's landing party from
the MINERVA, for the few hours needed to embark or destroy the stores.
The Turks were advancing step by step; and the place was not in
condition to resist one well-handled battalion supported by field
artillery.

However, Fakhri was too slow. He did not pass Bir el Sheikh in any
force till near the end of the first week in January, and seven days
later was still not ready to attack Khoreiba, where Ali had an outpost
of a few hundred men. The patrols were in touch; and an assault was
daily expected, but as regularly delayed.

In truth the Turks were meeting with unguessed difficulties. Their
headquarters were faced by a heavy sick rate among the men, and a
growing weakness of the animals: both symptoms of overwork and lack of
decent food. Always the activity of the tribesmen behind their back
hampered them. Clans might sometimes fall away from the Arab cause, but
did not therefore become trustworthy adherents of the Turks, who soon
found themselves in ubiquitously hostile country. The tribal raids in
the first fortnight of January caused them average daily losses of
forty camels and some twenty men killed and wounded, with corresponding
expense in stores.

These raids might occur at any point from ten miles seaward of Medina
itself for the next seventy miles through the hills. They illustrated
the obstacles in the way of the new Turkish Army with its half-Germanized
complexity of equipment, when, from a distant railhead with no
made roads, it tried to advance through extremely rugged and hostile
country. The administrative developments of scientific war had clogged
its mobility and destroyed its dash; and troubles grew in geometrical
rather than arithmetical progression for each new mile its commanding
officers put between themselves and Medina, their ill-found, insecure
and inconvenient base.

The situation was so unpromising for the Turks that Fakhri was probably
half glad when the forthcoming sudden moves of Abdulla and Feisal in
the last days of 1916 altered the strategic conception of the Hejaz
war, and hurried the Mecca expedition (after January the eighteenth
1917) back from the Sultani and the Fara and the Gaha roads, back from
Wadi Safra, to hold a passive defence of trenches within sight of the
walls of Medina: a static position which endured till the Armistice
ended the war and involved Turkey in the dismal surrender of the Holy
City and its helpless garrison.




CHAPTER XXII



Feisal was a fine, hot workman, whole-heartedly doing a thing when he
had agreed to it. He had pledged his word that he would go at once to
Wejh; so he and I sat down together on new-year's day for consideration
of what this move meant to us and to the Turks. Around us, stretching
up and down the Wadi Yenbo for miles, in little groups round palm-gardens,
under the thicker trees, and in all the side tributaries, wherever
there was shelter from the sun and rain, or good grazing for the
camels, were the soldiers of our army. The mountaineers, half-naked
footmen, had grown few. Most of the six thousand present were mounted
men of substance. Their coffee hearths were outlined from afar by the
camel saddles, pitched in circles round the fire as elbow-rests for men
reclining between meals. The Arabs' physical perfection let them lie
relaxed to the stony ground like lizards, moulding themselves to its
roughness in corpse-like abandon.

They were quiet but confident. Some, who had been serving Feisal for
six months or more, had lost that pristine heat of eagerness which had
so thrilled me in Hamra; but they had gained experience in
compensation; and staying-power in the ideal was fatter and more
important for us than an early fierceness. Their patriotism was now
conscious; and their attendance grew more regular as the distance from
their tomes increased. Tribal independence of orders was still
maintained; but they had achieved a mild routine in camp life and on
the march. When the Sherif came near they fell into a ragged line, and
together made the bow and sweep of the arm to the lips, which was the
official salute. They did not oil their guns: they said lest the sand
clog them; also they had no oil, and it was better rubbed in to soften
wind-chaps on their skin; but the guns were decently kept, and some of
the owners could shoot at long range.

In mass they were not formidable, since they had no corporate spirit,
nor discipline nor mutual confidence. The smaller the unit the better
its performance. A thousand were a mob, ineffective against a company
of trained Turks: but three or four Arabs in their hills would stop a
dozen Turks. Napoleon remarked this of the Mamelukes. We were yet too
breathless to turn our hasty practice into principle: our tactics were
empirical snatchings of the first means to escape difficulty. But we
were learning like our men.

From the battle of Nakhl Mubarak we abandoned the brigading of Egyptian
troops with irregulars. We embarked the Egyptian officers and men,
after turning over their complete equipment to Rasim, Feisal's gunner,
and Abdulla el Deleimi, his machine-gun officer. They built up Arab
companies out of local material, with a stiffening of Turk-trained
Syrian and Mesopotamian deserters. Maulud, the fire-eating A.D.C.,
begged fifty mules off me, put across them fifty of his trained
infantrymen, and told them they were cavalry. He was a martinet, and a
born mounted officer, and by his spartan exercises the much-beaten
mule-riders grew painfully into excellent soldiers, instantly obedient
and capable of formal attack. They were prodigies in the Arab ranks. We
telegraphed for another fifty mules, to double the dose of mounted
infantry, since the value of so tough a unit for reconnaissance was
obvious.

Feisal suggested taking nearly all the Juheina to Wejh with him and
adding to them enough of the Harb and Billi, Ateiba and Ageyl to give
the mass a many-tribed character. We wanted this march, which would be
in its way a closing act of the war in Northern Hejaz, to send a rumour
through the length and breadth of Western Arabia. It was to be the
biggest operation of the Arabs in their memory; dismissing those who
saw it to their homes, with a sense that their world had changed
indeed; so that there would be no more silly defections and jealousies
of clans behind us in future, to cripple us with family politics in the
middle of our fighting.

Not that we expected immediate opposition. We bothered to take this
unwieldy mob with us to Wejh, in the teeth of efficiency and
experience, just because there was no fighting in the bill. We had
intangible assets on our side. In the first place, the Turks had now
engaged their surplus strength in attacking Rabegh, or rather in
prolonging their occupied area so as to attack Rabegh. It would take
them days to transfer back north. Then the Turks were stupid, and we
reckoned on their not hearing all at once of our move, and on their not
believing its first tale, and not seeing till later what chances it had
given them. If we did our march in three weeks we should probably take
Wejh by surprise. Lastly, we might develop the sporadic raiding
activity of the Harb into conscious operations, to take booty, if
possible, in order to be self-supporting; but primarily to lock up
large numbers of Turks in defence positions. Zeid agreed to go down to
Rabegh to organize similar pin-pricks in the Turks' rear. I gave him
letters to the captain of the DUFFERIN, the Yenbo guardship, which
would ensure him a quick passage down: for all who knew of the Wejh
scheme were agog to help it.

To exercise my own hand in the raiding genre I took a test party of
thirty-five Mahamid with me from Nakhl Mubarak, on the second day of
1917, to the old blockhouse-well of my first journey from Rabegh to
Yenbo. When dark came we dismounted, and left our camels with ten men
to guard them against possible Turkish patrols. The rest of us climbed
up Dhifran: a painful climb, for the hills were of knife-sharp strata
turned on edge and running in oblique lines from crest to foot. They
gave abundance of broken surface, but no sure grip, for the stone was
so minutely cracked that any segment would come away from its matrix,
in the hand.

The head of Dhifran was cold and misty, and time dragged till dawn. We
disposed ourselves in crevices of the rock, and at last saw the tips of
bell-tents three hundred yards away beneath us to the right, behind a
spur. We could not get a full view, so contented ourselves with putting
bullets through their tops. A crowd of Turks turned out and leaped like
stags into their trenches. They were very fast targets, and probably
suffered little. In return they opened rapid fire in every direction,
and made a terrific row; as if signalling the Hamra force to turn out
in their help. As the enemy were already more than ten to one, the
reinforcements might have prevented our retreat: so we crawled gently
back till we could rush down into the first valley, where we fell over
two scared Turks, unbuttoned, at their morning exercise. They were
ragged, but something to show, and we dragged them homeward, where
their news proved useful.

Feisal was still nervous over abandoning Yenbo, hitherto his
indispensable base, and the second sea-port of Hejaz: and when casting
about for further expedients to distract the Turks from its occupation
we suddenly remembered Sidi Abdulla in Henakiyeh. He had some five
thousand irregulars, and a few guns and machine-guns, and the
reputation of his successful (if too slow) siege of Taif. It seemed a
shame to leave him wasting in the middle of the wilderness. A first
idea was that he might come to Kheibar, to threaten the railway north
of Medina: but Feisal improved my plan vastly, by remembering Wadi Ais,
the historic valley of springs and palm-villages flowing through the
impregnable Juheina hills from behind Rudhwa eastward to the Hamdh
valley near Hedia. It lay just one hundred kilometres north of Medina,
a direct threat on Fakhri's railway communications with Damascus. From
it Abdulla could keep up his arranged blockade of Medina from the east,
against caravans from the Persian Gulf. Also it was near Yenbo, which
could easily feed him there with munitions and supplies.

The proposal was obviously an inspiration and we sent off Raja el
Khuluwi at once to put it to Abdulla. So sure were we of his adopting
it that we urged Feisal to move away from Wadi Yenbo northward on the
first stage to Wejh, without waiting a reply.




CHAPTER XXIII



He agreed, and we took the wide upper road through Wadi Messarih, for
Owais, a group of wells about fifteen miles to the north of Yenbo. The
hills were beautiful to-day. The rains of December had been abundant,
and the warm sun after them had deceived the earth into believing it
was spring. So a thin grass had come up in all the hollows and flat
places. The blades (single, straight and very slender) shot up between
the stones. If a man bent over from his saddle and looked downward he
would see no new colour in the ground; but, by looking forward, and
getting a distant slope at a flat angle with his eye, he could feel a
lively mist of pale green here and there over the surface of slate-blue
and brown-red rock. In places the growth was strong, and our
painstaking camels had become prosperous, grazing on it.

The starting signal went, but only for us and the Ageyl. The other
units of the army, standing each man by his couched camel, lined up
beside our road, and, as Feisal came near, saluted him in silence. He
called back cheerfully, 'Peace upon you', and each head sheikh returned
the phrase. When we had passed they mounted, taking the time from their
chiefs, and so the forces behind us swelled till there was a line of
men and camels winding along the narrow pass towards the watershed for
as far back as the eye reached.

Feisal's greetings had been the only sounds before we reached the crest
of the rise where the valley opened out and became a gentle forward
slope of soft shingle and flint bedded in sand: but there ibn Dakhil,
the keen sheikh of Russ, who had raised this contingent of Ageyl two
years before to aid Turkey, and had brought it over with him intact to
the Sherif when the revolt came, dropped back a pace or two, marshalled
our following into a broad column of ordered ranks, and made the drums
strike up. Everyone burst out singing a full-throated song in honour of
Emir Feisal and his family.

The march became rather splendid and barbaric. First rode Feisal in
white, then Sharraf at his right in red head-cloth and henna-dyed tunic
and cloak, myself on his left in white and scarlet, behind us three
banners of faded crimson silk with gilt spikes, behind them the
drummers playing a march, and behind them again the wild mass of twelve
hundred bouncing camels of the bodyguard, packed as closely as they
could move, the men in every variety of coloured clothes and the camels
nearly as brilliant in their trappings. We filled the valley to its
banks with our flashing stream.

At the mouth of Messarih, a messenger rode up with letters to Feisal
from Abd el Kader, in Yenbo. Among them was one three days old for me
from the DUFFERIN to say that she would not embark Zeid till she had
seen me and heard details of the local situation. She was in the Sherm,
a lonely creek eight miles up the coast from the port, where the
officers could play cricket on the beach without the plague of flies
pervading Yenbo. Of course, they cut themselves off from news by
staying so far away: it was a point of old friction between us. Her
well-meaning commander had not the breadth of Boyle, the fiery
politician and revolutionary constitutionalist, nor the brain of
Linberry, of the HARDINGE, who filled himself with the shore gossip of
every port he touched, and who took pains to understand the nature of
all classes on his beat.

Apparently I had better race off to DUFFERIN and regulate affairs. Zeid
was a nice fellow, but would assuredly do something quaint in his
enforced holiday; and we needed peace just then. Feisal sent some Ageyl
with me and we made speed for Yenbo: indeed, I got there in three
hours, leaving my disgusted escort (who said they would wear out
neither camels nor bottoms for my impatience) half way back on the road
across the plain so wearily well known to me. The sun, which had been
delightful overhead in the hills, now, in the evening, shone straight
into our faces with a white fury, before which I had to press my hand
as shield over my eyes. Feisal had given me a racing camel (a present
from the Emir of Nejd to his father), the finest and roughest animal I
had ridden. Later she died of overwork, mange, and necessary neglect on
the road to Akaba.

On arrival in Yenbo things were not as expected. Zeid had been
embarked, and the DUFFERIN had started that morning for Rabegh. So I
sat down to count what we needed of naval help on the way to Wejh, and
to scheme out means of transport. Feisal had promised to wait at Owais
till he got my report that everything was ready.

The first check was a conflict between the civil and military powers.
Abd el Kader, the energetic but temperamental governor, had been
cluttered up with duties as our base grew in size, till Feisal added to
him a military commandant, Tewfik Bey, a Syrian from Horns, to care for
ordnance stores. Unfortunately, there was no arbiter to define ordnance
stores. That morning they fell out over empty arms-chests. Abd el Kadir
locked the store and went to lunch. Tewfik came down to the quay with
four men, a machine-gun and a sledge hammer, and opened the door. Abd
el Kader got into a boat, rowed out to the British guardship--the tiny
ESPIEGLE--and told her embarrassed but hospitable captain that he had
come to stay. His servant brought him food from the shore and he slept
the night in a camp-bed on the quarter-deck.

I wanted to hurry, so began to solve the deadlock by making Abd el
Kadir write to Feisal for his decision and by making Tewfik hand over
the store to me. We brought the trawler ARETHUSA near the sloop, that
Abd el Kader might direct the loading of the disputed chests from his
ship, and lastly brought Tewfik off to the ESPIEGLE for a temporary
reconciliation. It was made easy by an accident, for, as Tewfik saluted
his guard of honour at the gangway (not strictly regular, this guard,
but politic), his face beamed and he said: This ship captured me at
Kurna, pointing to the trophy of the nameplate of the Turkish gunboat
MARMARIS, which the ESPIEGLE had sunk in action on the Tigris. Abd el
Kadir was as interested in the tale as Tewfik, and the trouble ceased.

Sharraf came into Yenbo next day as Emir, in Feisal's place. He was a
powerful man, perhaps the most capable of all the Sherifs in the army,
but devoid of ambition: acting out of duty, not from impulse. He was
rich, and had been for years chief justice of the Sherifs court. He
knew and handled tribesmen better than any man, and they feared him,
for he was severe and impartial, and his face was sinister, with a left
eyebrow which drooped (the effect of an old blow) and gave him an air
of forbidding hardness. The surgeon of the SUVA operated on the eye and
repaired much of the damage, but the face remained one to rebuke
liberties or weakness. I found him good to work with, very clear-headed,
wise and kind, with a pleasant smile-his mouth became soft then, while
his eyes remained terrible-and a determination to do fittingly, always.

We agreed that the risk of the fall of Yenbo while we hunted Wejh was
great, and that it would be wise to empty it of stores. Boyle gave me
an opportunity by signalling that either DUFFERIN or HARDINGE would be
made available for transport. I replied that as difficulties would be
severe I preferred HARDINGE! Captain Warren, whose ship intercepted the
message, felt it superfluous, but it brought along HARDINGE in the best
temper two days later. She was an Indian troop-ship, and her lowest
troop-deck had great square ports along the water level. Linberry
opened these for us, and we stuffed straight in eight thousand rifles,
three million rounds of ammunition, thousands of shells, quantities of
rice and flour, a shed-full of uniforms, two tons of high explosive,
and all our petrol, pell-mell. It was like posting letters in a box. In
no time she had taken a thousand tons of stuff.

Boyle came in eager for news. He promised the HARDINGE as depot ship
throughout, to land food and water whenever needed, and this solved the
main difficulty. The Navy were already collecting. Half the Red Sea
Fleet would be present. The admiral was expected and landing parties
were being drilled on every ship. Everyone was dyeing white duck
khaki-coloured, or sharpening bayonets, or practising with rifles.

I hoped silently, in their despite, that there would be no fighting.
Feisal had nearly ten thousand men, enough to fill the whole Billi
country with armed parties and carry off everything not too heavy or
too hot. The Billi knew it, and were now profuse in their loyalties to
the Sherif, completely converted to Arab nationality.

It was sure that we would take Wejh: the fear was lest numbers of
Feisal's host die of hunger or thirst on the way. Supply was my
business, and rather a responsibility. However, the country to Urn
Lejj, half way, was friendly: nothing tragic could happen so far as
that: therefore, we sent word to Feisal that all was ready, and he left
Owais on the very day that Abdulla replied welcoming the Ais plan and
promising an immediate start thither. The same day came news of my
relief. Newcombe, the regular colonel being sent to Hejaz as chief of
our military mission, had arrived in Egypt, and his two staff officers,
Cox and Vickery, were actually on their way down the Red Sea, to join
this expedition.

Boyle took me to Um Lejj in the SUVA, and we went ashore to get the
news. The sheikh told us that Feisal would arrive to-day, at Bir el
Waheidi, the water supply, four miles inland. We sent up a message for
him and then walked over to the fort which Boyle had shelled some
months before from the FOX. It was just a rubble barrack, and Boyle
looked at the ruins and said: I'm rather ashamed of myself for smashing
such a potty place.' He was a very professional officer, alert,
businesslike and official; sometimes a little intolerant of easy-going
things and people. Red-haired men are seldom patient. 'Ginger Boyle',
as they called him, was warm.

While we were looking over the ruins four grey ragged elders of the
village came up and asked leave to speak. They said that some months
before a sudden two-funnelled ship had come up and destroyed their
fort. They were now required to re-build it for the police of the Arab
Government. Might they ask the generous captain of this peaceable
one-funnelled ship for a little timber, or for other material help towards
the restoration? Boyle was restless at their long speech, and snapped
at me, What is it? What do they want?' I said, 'Nothing; they were
describing the terrible effect of the FOX'S bombardment.' Boyle looked
round him for a moment and smiled grimly, 'It's a fair mess'.

Next day Vickery arrived. He was a gunner, and in his ten years'
service in the Sudan had learned Arabic, both literary and colloquial,
so well that he would quit us of all need of an interpreter. We
arranged to go up with Boyle to Feisal's camp to make the timetable for
the attack, and after lunch Englishmen and Arabs got to work and
discussed the remaining march to Wejh.

We decided to break the army into sections: and that these should
proceed independently to our concentration place of Abu Zereibat in
Hamdh, after which there was no water before Wejh; but Boyle agreed
that the HARDINGE should take station for a single night in Sherm
Habban--supposed to be a possible harbour--and land twenty tons of water
for us on the beach. So that was settled.

For the attack on Wejh we offered Boyle an Arab landing party of
several hundred Harb and Juheina peasantry and freed men, under Saleh
ibn Shefia, a negroid boy of good courage (with the faculty of
friendliness) who kept his men in reasonable order by conjurations and
appeals, and never minded how much his own dignity was outraged by them
or by us. Boyle accepted them and decided to put them on another deck
of the many-stomached HARDINGE. They, with the naval party, would land
north of the town, where the Turks had no post to block a landing, and
whence Wejh and its harbour were best turned.

Boyle would have at least six ships, with fifty guns to occupy the
Turks' minds, and a seaplane ship to direct the guns. We would be at
Abu Zereibat on the twentieth of the month: at Habban for the
HARDINGE'S water on the twenty-second: and the landing party should go
ashore at dawn on the twenty-third, by which time our mounted men would
have closed all roads of escape from the town.

The news from Rabegh was good; and the Turks had made no attempt to
profit by the nakedness of Yenbo. These were our hazards, and when
Boyle's wireless set them at rest we were mightily encouraged. Abdulla
was almost in Ais: we were half-way to Wejh: the initiative had passed
to the Arabs. I was so joyous that for a moment I forgot my self-control,
and said exultingly that in a year we would be tapping on the
gates of Damascus. A chill came over the feeling in the tent and my
hopefulness died. Later, I heard that Vickery had gone to Boyle and
vehemently condemned me as a braggart and visionary; but, though the
outburst was foolish, it was not an impossible dream, for five months
later I was in Damascus, and a year after that I was its DE FACTO
Governor.

Vickery had disappointed me, and I had angered him. He knew I was
militarily incompetent and thought me politically absurd. I knew he was
the trained soldier our cause needed, and yet he seemed blind to its
power. The Arabs nearly made shipwreck through this blindness of
European advisers, who would not see that rebellion was not war:
indeed, was more of the nature of peace--a national strike perhaps. The
conjunction of Semites, an idea, and an armed prophet held illimitable
possibilities; in skilled hands it would have been, not Damascus, but
Constantinople which was reached in 1918.




CHAPTER XXIV



Early next morning, having seen that the HARDINGE was unloading without
friction, I went ashore to Sheikh Yusuf, and found him helping his
Bisha police, the frightened villagers and a squad of old Maulud's men
to throw a quick barricade across the end of the main street. He told
me that fifty wild mules, without halter or bridle or saddle, had been
loosed on shore that morning from a ship. By luck rather than skill
they had been stampeded into the market-place: the exits were now
safely barred, and there they must remain, ramping about the stalls,
till Maulud, to whom they were addressed, invented saddlery in the
wilderness. This was the second batch of fifty mules for the mounted
unit, and by the chance of our fear at Yenbo we, fortunately, had spare
ropes and bits enough for them on board the HARDINGE. So by noon the
shops were again open, and the damage paid for.

I went up to Feisal's camp, which was busy. Some of the tribes were
drawing a month's wages; all were getting eight days' food; tents and
heavy baggage were being stored; and the last arrangement for the march
being made. I sat and listened to the chatter of the staff: Faiz el
Ghusein, Beduin sheikh, Turkish official, chronicler of the Armenian
massacres, now secretary; Nesib el Bekri, Damascene land-owner, and
Feisal's host in Syria, now exiled from his country with a death-sentence
over him; Sami, Nesib's brother, graduate of the Law School, and
now assistant paymaster; Shefik el Eyr, ex-journalist, now assistant
secretary, a little white-faced man, and furtive, with a whispering
manner, honest in his patriotism, but in Me perverse, and so a nasty
colleague.

Hassan Sharaf, the headquarters' doctor, a noble man who had put not
merely his Me, but his purse to service in the Arab cause, was
plaintive with excess of disgust at finding his phials smashed and
their drugs confounded in the bottom of his chest. Shefik rallying him,
said, 'Do you expect a rebellion to be comfortable?' and the contrast
with the pale misery of their manner delighted us. In hardships the
humour of triteness outweighed a whole world of wit.

With Feisal in the evening we talked of the coming marches. The first
stage was short: to Semna, where were palm-groves and wells of abundant
water. After that there was choice of ways, to be determined only when
our scouts returned with reports as to ponded rainwater. By the coast,
the straight road, it was sixty dry miles to the next well, and our
multitude of footmen would find that long.

The army at Bir el Waheida amounted to five thousand one hundred
camel-riders, and five thousand three hundred men on foot, with four
Krupp mountain guns, and ten machine-guns: and for transport we had three
hundred and eighty baggage camels. Everything was cut to the lowest,
far below the standard of the Turks. Our start was set for January the
eighteenth just after noon, and punctually by lunch-time Feisal's work
was finished. We were a merry party: Feisal himself, relaxed after
responsibility, Abd el Kerim, never very serious, Sherif Jabar, Nasib
and Sami, Shefik, Hassan Sharaf and myself. After lunch the tent was
struck. We went to our camels, where they were couched in a circle,
saddled and loaded, each held short by the slave standing on its
doubled foreleg. The kettle drummer, waiting beside ibn Dakhil, who
commanded the bodyguard, rolled his drum seven or eight times, and
everything became still. We watched Feisal. He got up from his rug, on
which he had been saying a last word to Abd el Kerim, caught the
saddle-pommels in his hands, put his knee on the side and said aloud,
'Make God your agent'. The slave released the camel, which sprang up.
When it was on its feet Feisal passed his other leg across its back,
swept his skirts and his cloak under him by a wave of the arm, and
settled himself in the saddle.

As his camel moved we had jumped for ours, and the whole mob rose
together, some of the beasts roaring, but the most quiet, as trained
she-camels should be. Only a young animal, a male or ill-bred, would
grumble on the road, and self-respecting Beduins did not ride such,
since the noise might give them away by night or in surprise attacks.
The camels took their first abrupt steps, and we riders had quickly to
hook our legs round the front cantles, and pick up the head-stalls to
check the pace. We then looked where Feisal was, and tapped our mounts'
heads gently round, and pressed them on the shoulders with our bare
feet till they were in line beside him. Ibn Dakhil came up, and after a
glance at the country and the direction of march passed a short order
for the Ageyl to arrange themselves in wings, out to right and left of
us for two or three hundred yards, camel marching by camel in line as
near as the accidents underfoot permitted. The manoeuvre was neatly
done.

These Ageyl were Nejd townsmen, the youth of Aneyza, Boreida or Russ,
who had contracted for service as regular camel corps for a term of
years. They were young, from sixteen to twenty-five, and nice fellows,
large-eyed, cheery, a bit educated, catholic, intelligent, good
companions on the road. There was seldom a heavy one. Even in repose
(when most Eastern faces emptied themselves of life) these lads
remained keen-looking and handsome. They talked a delicate and elastic
Arabic, and were mannered, often foppish, in habit. The docility and
reasonableness of their town-bred minds made them look after themselves
and their masters without reiterated instructions. Their fathers dealt
in camels, and they had followed the trade from infancy; consequently
they wandered instinctively, like Beduin; while the decadent softness
in their nature made them biddable, tolerant of the harshness and
physical punishment which in the East were the outward proofs of
discipline. They were essentially submissive; yet had the nature of
soldiers, and fought with brains and courage when familiarly led.

Not being a tribe, they had no blood enemies, but passed freely in the
desert: the carrying trade and chaffer of the interior lay in their
hands. The gains of the desert were poor, but enough to tempt them
abroad, since the conditions of their home-life were uncomfortable. The
Wahabis, followers of a fanatical Moslem heresy, had imposed their
strict rules on easy and civilized Kasim. In Kasim there was but little
coffee-hospitality, much prayer and fasting, no tobacco, no artistic
dalliance with women, no silk clothes, no gold and silver head-ropes or
ornaments. Everything was forcibly pious or forcibly puritanical.

It was a natural phenomenon, this periodic rise at intervals of little
more than a century, of ascetic creeds in Central Arabia. Always the
votaries found their neighbours' beliefs cluttered with inessential
things, which became impious in the hot imagination of their preachers.
Again and again they had arisen, had taken possession, soul and body,
of the tribes, and had dashed themselves to pieces on the urban
Semites, merchants and concupiscent men of the world. About their
comfortable possessions the new creeds ebbed and flowed like the tides
or the changing seasons, each movement with the seeds of early death in
its excess of Tightness. Doubtless they must recur so long as the
causes--sun, moon, wind, acting in the emptiness of open spaces, weigh
without check on the unhurried and uncumbered minds of the
desert-dwellers.

However, this afternoon the Ageyl were not thinking of GOD, but of us,
and as ibn Dakhil ranged them to the right and left they fell eagerly
into rank. There came a warning patter from the drums and the poet of
the right wing burst into strident song, a single invented couplet, of
Feisal and the pleasures he would afford us at Wejh. The right wing
listened to the verse intently, took it up and sang it together once,
twice and three times, with pride and self-satisfaction and derision.
However, before they could brandish it a fourth time the poet of the
left wing broke out in extempore reply, in the same metre, in answering
rhyme, and capping the sentiment. The left wing cheered it in a roar of
triumph, the drums tapped again, the standard-bearers threw out their
great crimson banners, and the whole guard, right, left and centre,
broke together into the rousing regimental chorus,

I've lost Britain, and I've lost Gaul, I've lost Rome, and, worst of
all, I've lost Lalage--'

only it was Nejd they had lost, and the women of the Maabda, and their
future lay from Jidda towards Suez. Yet it was a good song, with a
rhythmical beat which the camels loved, so that they put down their
heads, stretched their necks out far and with lengthened pace shuffled
forward musingly while it lasted.

Our road to-day was easy for them, since it was over firm sand slopes,
long, slowly-rising waves of dunes, bare-backed, but for scrub in the
folds, or barren palm-trees solitary in the moist depressions.
Afterwards in a broad flat, two horsemen came cantering across from the
left to greet Feisal. I knew the first one, dirty old blear-eyed
Mohammed Ah' el Beidawi, Emir of the Juheina: but the second looked
strange. When he came nearer I saw he was in khaki uniform, with a
cloak to cover it and a silk head-cloth and head-rope, much awry. He
looked up, and there was Newcombe's red and peeling face, with
straining eyes and vehement mouth, a strong, humorous grin between the
jaws. He had arrived at Um Lejj this morning, and hearing we were only
just off, had seized Sheikh Yu-suf's fastest horse and galloped after
us.

I offered him my spare camel and an introduction to Feisal, whom he
greeted like an old school-friend; and at once they plunged into the
midst of things, suggesting, debating, planning at lightning speed.
Newcombe's initial velocity was enormous, and the freshness of the day
and the life and happiness of the Army gave inspiration to the march
and brought the future bubbling out of us without pain.

We passed Ghowashia, a ragged grove of palms, and marched over a
lava-field easily, its roughnesses being drowned in sand just deep enough
to smooth them, but not deep enough to be too soft. The tops of the
highest lava-piles showed through. An hour later we came suddenly to a
crest which dropped as a sand slope, abrupt and swept and straight
enough to be called a sand-cliff, into a broad splendid valley of
rounded pebbles. This was Semna, and our road went down the steep,
through terraces of palms.

The wind had been following our march, and so it was very still and
warm at bottom of the valley in lee of the great bank of sand. Here was
our water, and here we would halt till the scouts returned from seeking
rain-pools in front of us; for so Abd el Kerim, our chief guide, had
advised. We rode the four hundred yards across the valley and up the
further slopes till we were safe from floods, and there Feisal tapped
his camel lightly on the neck till she sank to her knees with a scrape
of shingle pushed aside, and settled herself. Hejris spread the carpet
for us, and with the other Sherifs we sat and jested while the coffee
was made hot.

I maintained against Feisal the greatness of Ibrahim Pasha, leader of
Milli-Kurds, in North Mesopotamia. When he was to march, his women rose
before dawn, and footing noiselessly overhead on the taut tentcloth,
unskewered the strips of it, while others beneath held and removed the
poles till all was struck and divided into camel-loads, and loaded.
Then they drove off, so that the Pasha awoke alone on his pallet in the
open air where at night he had lain down in the rich inner compartment
of his palace-tent.

He would get up at leisure and drink coffee on his carpet: and
afterwards the horses would be brought, and they would ride towards the
new camping ground. But if on his way he thirsted he would crisp his
fingers to the servants, and the coffee man would ride up beside him
with his pots ready and his brazier burning on a copper bracket of the
saddle, to serve the cup on the march without breaking stride; and at
sunset they would find the women waiting in the erected tent, as it had
been on the evening before.

To-day had a grey weather, so strange after the many thronging suns,
that Newcombe and I walked stooping to look where our shadows had gone,
as we talked of what I hoped, and of what he wanted.

They were the same thing, so we had brain-leisure to note Semna and its
fine groves of cared-for palms between little hedges of dead thorn;
with here and there huts of reed and palm-rib, to shelter the owners
and their families at times of fertilization and harvest. In the lowest
gardens and in the valley bed were the shallow wood-lined wells, whose
water was, they said, fairly sweet and never-failing: but so little
fluent that to water our host of camels took the night.

Feisal wrote letters from Semna to twenty-five leaders of the Billi and
Howeitat and Beni Atiyeh, saying that he with his army would be
instantly in Wejh and they must see to it. Mohammed Ali bestirred
himself, and since almost all our men were of his tribe, was useful in
arranging the detachments and detailing them their routes for the
morrow. Our water-scouts had come in, to report shallow pools at two
points well-spaced on the coast road. After cross-questioning them we
decided to send four sections that way, and the other five by the
hills: in such a fashion we thought we should arrive soonest and safest
at Abu Zereibat.

The route was not easy to decide with the poor help of the Musa
Juheina, our informants. They seemed to have no unit of time smaller
than the half-day, or of distance between the span and the stage; and a
stage might be from six to sixteen hours according to the man's will
and camel. Intercommunication between our units was hindered because
often there was no one who could read or write, in either. Delay,
confusion, hunger and thirst marred this expedition. These might have
been avoided had time let us examine the route beforehand. The animals
were without food for nearly three days, and the men marched the last
fifty miles on half a gallon of water, with nothing to eat. It did not
in any way dim their spirit, and they trotted into Wejh gaily enough,
hoarsely singing, and executing mock charges: but Feisal said that
another hot and barren midday would have broken both their speed and
their energy.

When business ended, Newcombe and I went off to sleep in the tent
Feisal had lent us as a special luxury. Baggage conditions were so hard
and important for us that we rich took pride in faring like the men,
who could not transport unnecessary things: and never before had I had
a tent of my own. We pitched it at the very edge of a bluff of the
foothills; a bluff no wider than the tent and rounded, so that the
slope went straight down from the pegs of the door-flap. There we found
sitting and waiting for us Abd el Kerim, the young Beidawi Sherif,
wrapped up to the eyes in his head-cloth and cloak, since the evening
was chill and threatened rain. He had come to ask me for a mule, with
saddle and bridle. The smart appearance of Maulud's little company in
breeches and puttees, and their fine new animals in the market at Um
Lejj, had roused his desire.

I played with his eagerness, and put him off, advancing a condition
that he should ask me after our successful arrival at Wejh; and with
this he was content. We hungered for sleep, and at last he rose to go,
but, chancing to look across the valley, saw the hollows beneath and
about us winking with the faint camp-fires of the scattered
contingents. He called me out to look, and swept his arm round, saying
half-sadly, 'We are no longer Arabs but a People'.

He was half-proud too, for the advance on Wejh was their biggest
effort; the first time in memory that the manhood of a tribe, with
transport, arms, and food for two hundred miles, had left its district
and marched into another's territory without the hope of plunder or the
stimulus of blood feud. Abd el Kerim was glad that his tribe had shown
this new spirit of service, but also sorry; for to him the joys of life
were a fast camel, the best weapons, and a short sharp raid against his
neighbour's herd: and the gradual achievement of Feisal's ambition was
making such joys less and less easy for the responsible.




CHAPTER XXV



During the morning it rained persistently; and we were glad to see more
water coming to us, and so comfortable in the tents at Semna that we
delayed our start till the sun shone again in the early afternoon. Then
we rode westward down the valley in the fresh light. First behind us
came the Ageyl. After them Abd el Kerim led his Gufa men, about seven
hundred of them mounted, with more than that number following afoot.
They were dressed in white, with large head-shawls of red and black
striped cotton, and they waved green palm-branches instead of banners.

Next to them rode Sherif Mohammed Ali abu Sharrain, an old patriarch
with a long, curling grey beard and an upright carriage of himself. His
three hundred riders were Ashraf, of the Aiaishi (Juheina) stock, known
Sherifs, but only acknowledged in the mass, since they had not
inscribed pedigrees. They wore rusty-red tunics henna-dyed, under black
cloaks, and carried swords. Each had a slave crouched behind him on the
crupper to help him with rifle and dagger in the fight, and to watch
his camel and cook for him on the road. The slaves, as befitted slaves
of poor masters, were very little dressed. Their strong, black legs
gripped the camels' woolly sides as in a vice, to lessen the shocks
inevitable on their bony perches, while they had knotted up their rags
of shirts into the plaited thong about their loins to save them from
the fouling of the camels and their staling on the march. Semna water
was medicinal, and our animals' dung flowed like green soup down their
hocks that day.

Behind the Ashraf came the crimson banner of our last tribal
detachment, the Rifaa, under Owdi ibn Zuweid, the old wheedling
sea-pirate who had robbed the Stotzingen Mission and thrown their
wireless and their Indian servants into the sea at Yenbo. The sharks
presumably refused the wireless, but we had spent fruitless hours dragging
for it in the harbour. Owdi still wore a long, rich, fur-lined German
officer's greatcoat, a garment little suited to the climate but, as he
insisted, magnificent booty. He had about a thousand men, three-quarters
of them on foot, and next him marched Rasim, the gunner commandant,
with his four old Krupp guns on the pack-mules, just as we had lifted
them from the Egyptian Army.

Rasim was a sardonic Damascene, who rose laughing to every crisis and
slunk about sore-headed with grievances when things went well. On this
day there were dreadful murmurings, for alongside him rode Abdulla el
Deleimi, in charge of machine-guns, a quick, clever, superficial but
attractive officer, much of the professional type, whose great joy was
to develop some rankling sorrow in Rasim till it discharged full blast
on Feisal or myself. To-day I helped him by smiling to Rasim that we
were moving at intervals of a quarter-day in echelon of sub-tribes.
Rasim looked over the new-washed underwood, where raindrops glistened
in the light of the sun setting redly across the waves below a ceiling
of clouds, and looked too at the wild mob of Beduins racing here and
there on foot after birds and rabbits and giant lizards and jerboas and
one another: and assented sourly, saying that he too would shortly
become a sub-tribe, and echelon himself half a day to one side or
other, and be quit of flies.

At first starting a man in the crowd had shot a hare from the saddle,
but because of the risk of wild shooting Feisal had then forbidden it,
and those later put up by our camels' feet were chased with sticks. We
laughed at the sudden commotion in the marching companies: cries, and
camels swerving violently, their riders leaping off and laying out
wildly with their canes to kill or to be pickers-up of a kill. Feisal
was happy to see the army win so much meat, but disgusted at the
shameless Juheina appetite for lizards and jerboas.

We rode over the flat sand, among the thorn trees, which here were
plentiful and large, till we came out on the sea-beach and turned
northward along a broad, well-beaten track, the Egyptian pilgrim road.
It ran within fifty yards of the sea, and we could go up it thirty or
forty singing files abreast. An old lava-bed half buried in sand jutted
out from the hills four or five miles inland, and made a promontory.
The road cut across this, but at the near side were some mud flats, on
which shallow reaches of water burned in the last light of the west.
This was our expected stage, and Feisal signalled the halt. We got off
our camels and stretched ourselves, sat down or walked before supper to
the sea and bathed by hundreds, a splashing, screaming, mob of fish-like
naked men of all earth's colours.

Supper was to look forward to, as a Juheina that afternoon had shot a
gazelle for Feisal. Gazelle meat we found better than any other in the
desert, because this beast, however barren the land and dry the
water-holes, seemed to own always a fat juicy body.

The meal was the expected success. We retired early, feeling too full:
but soon after Newcombe and myself had stretched out in our tent we
were quickened by a wave of excitement travelling up the lines; running
camels, shots, and shouts. A breathless slave thrust his head under the
flap crying, 'News! news! Sherif Bey is taken'. I jumped up and ran
through the gathering crowd to Feisal's tent, which was already beset
by friends and servants. With Feisal sat, portentously and unnaturally
collected in the din, Raja, the tribesman who had taken to Abdulla word
to move into Wadi Ais. Feisal was radiant, his eyes swollen with joy,
as he jumped up and shouted to me through the voices, 'Abdulla has
captured Eshref Bey'. Then I knew how big and good the event was.

Eshref was a notorious adventurer in the lower levels of Turkish
politics. In his boyhood, near his Smyrna home, he had been just a
brigand, but with years he became a revolutionary, and when he was
finally captured Abd el Hamid exiled him to Medina for five coloured
years. At first he was closely confined there, but one day he broke the
privy window and escaped to Shehad, the bibulous Emir, in his suburb of
Awali. Shahad was, as usual, at war with the Turks and gave him
sanctuary; but Eshref, finding ME dull, at last borrowed a fine mare
and rode to the Turkish barracks. On its square was the officer-son of
his enemy the Governor drilling a company of gendarmes. He galloped him
down, slung him across his saddle, and made away before the astonished
police could protest.

He took to Jebel Ohod, an uninhabited place, driving his prisoner
before him, calling him his ass, and lading upon him thirty loaves and
the skins of water necessary for their nourishment. To recover his son,
the Pasha gave Eshref liberty on parole and five hundred pounds. He
bought camels, a tent, and a wife, and wandered among the tribes till
the Young Turk revolution. Then he reappeared in Constantinople and
became a bravo, doing Enver's murders. His services earned the
appointment of inspector of refugee-relief in Macedonia, and he retired
a year later with an assured income from landed estate.

When war broke out he went down to Medina with funds, and letters from
the Sultan to Arabian neutrals; his mission being to open
communications with the isolated Turkish garrison in Yemen. His track
on the first stage of the journey had happened to cross Abdulla's, on
his way to Wadi Ais, near Kheibar, and some of the Arabs, watching
their camels during a midday halt, had been stopped by Eshref's men and
questioned. They said they were Heteym, and Abdulla's army a supply
caravan going to Medina. Eshref released one with orders to bring the
rest for examination, and this man told Abdulla of soldiers camped up
on the hill.

Abdulla was puzzled and sent horsemen to investigate. A minute later he
was startled by the sudden chatter of a machine-gun. He leaped to the
conclusion that the Turks had sent out a flying column to cut him off,
and ordered his mounted men to charge them desperately. They galloped
over the machine-gun, with few casualties, and scattered the Turks.
Eshref fled on foot to the hill-top. Abdulla offered a reward of a
thousand pounds for him; and near dusk he was found, wounded, and
captured by Sherif Fauzan el Harith, in a stiff fight.

In the baggage were twenty thousand pounds in coin, robes of honour,
costly presents, some interesting papers, and camel loads of rifles and
pistols. Abdulla wrote an exultant letter to Fakhri Pasha (telling him
of the capture), and nailed it to an uprooted telegraph pole between
the metals, when he crossed the railway next night on his unimpeded way
to Wadi Ais. Raja had left him there, camped in quiet and in ease. The
news was a double fortune for us.

Between the joyful men slipped the sad figure of the Imam, who raised
his hand. Silence fell for an instant. Hear me,' he said, and intoned
an ode in praise of the event, to the effect that Abdulla was
especially favoured, and had attained quickly to the glory which Feisal
was winning slowly but surely by hard work. The poem was creditable as
the issue of only sixteen minutes, and the poet was rewarded in gold.
Then Feisal saw a gaudy jewelled dagger at Raja's belt. Raja stammered
it was Eshref's. Feisal threw him his own and pulled the other off, to
give it in the end to Colonel Wilson. What did my brother say to
Eshref?' Is this your return for our hospitality?' While Eshref had
replied like Suckling, 'I can fight, Whether I am the wrong or right,
Devoutly!'

'How many millions did the Arabs get?' gasped greedy old Mohammed Ali,
when he heard of Abdulla to the elbows in the captured chest, flinging
gold by handfuls to the tribes. Raja was everywhere in hot demand, and
he slept a richer man that night, deservedly, for Abdulla's march to
Ais made the Medina situation sure. With Murray pressing in Sinai,
Feisal nearing Wejh, and Abdulla between Wejh and Medina, the position
of the Turks in Arabia became defensive only. The tide of our ill-fortune
had turned; and the camp seeing our glad faces was noisy until dawn.

Next day we rode easily. A breakfast suggested itself, upon our finding
some more little water-pools, in a bare valley flowing down from El
Sukhur, a group of three extraordinary hills like granite bubbles blown
through the earth. The journey was pleasant, for it was cool; there
were a lot of us; and we two Englishmen had a tent in which we could
shut ourselves up and be alone. A weariness of the desert was the
living always in company, each of the party hearing all that was said
and seeing all that was done by the others day and night. Yet the
craving for solitude seemed part of the delusion of self-sufficiency, a
factitious making-rare of the person to enhance its strangeness in its
own estimation. To have privacy, as Newcombe and I had, was ten
thousand times more restful than the open life, but the work suffered
by the creation of such a bar between the leaders and men. Among the
Arabs there were no distinctions, traditional or natural, except the
unconscious power given a famous sheikh by virtue of his
accomplishment; and they taught me that no man could be their leader
except he ate the ranks' food, wore their clothes, lived level with
them, and yet appeared better in himself.

In the morning we pressed towards Abu Zereibat with the early sun
incandescent in a cloudless sky, and the usual eye-racking dazzle and
dance of sunbeams on polished sand or polished flint. Our path rose
slightly at a sharp limestone ridge with eroded flanks, and we looked
over a sweeping fall of bare, black gravel between us and the sea,
which now lay about eight miles to the westward: but invisible.

Once we halted and began to feel that a great depression lay in front
of us; but not till two in the afternoon after we had crossed a basalt
outcrop did we look out over a trough fifteen miles across, which was
Wadi Hamdh, escaped from the hills. On the north-west spread the great
delta through which Hamdh spilled itself by twenty mouths; and we saw
the dark lines, which were thickets of scrub in the flood channels of
the dried beds, twisting in and out across the flat from the hill-edge
beneath us, till they were lost in the sun-haze thirty miles away
beyond us to our left, near the invisible sea. Behind Hamdh rose sheer
from the plain a double hill, Jebel Raal: hog-backed but for a gash
which split it in the middle. To our eyes, sated with small things, it
was a fair sight, this end of a dry river longer than the Tigris; the
greatest valley in Arabia, first understood by Doughty, and as yet
unexplored; while Raal was a fine hill, sharp and distinctive, which
did honour to the Hamdh.

Full of expectation we rode down the gravel slopes, on which tufts of
grass became more frequent, till at three o'clock we entered the Wadi
itself. It proved a bed about a mile wide, filled with clumps of ASLA
bushes, round which clung sandy hillocks each a few feet high. Their
sand was not pure, but seamed with lines of dry and brittle clay, last
indications of old flood levels. These divided them sharply into
layers, rotten with salty mud and flaking away, so that our camels sank
in, fetlock-deep, with a crunching noise like breaking pastry. The dust
rose up in thick clouds, thickened yet more by the sunlight held in
them; for the dead air of the hollow was a-dazzle.

The ranks behind could not see where they were going, which was
difficult for them, as the hillocks came closer together, and the
river-bed slit into a maze of shallow channels, the work of partial
floods year after year. Before we gained the middle of the valley
everything was over-grown by brushwood, which sprouted sideways from
the mounds and laced one to another with tangled twigs as dry, dusty
and brittle as old bone. We tucked in the streamers of our gaudy
saddle-bags, to prevent their being jerked off by the bushes, drew
cloaks tight over our clothes, bent our heads down to guard our eyes
and crashed through like a storm amongst reeds. The dust was blinding
and choking, and the snapping of the branches, grumbles of the camels,
shouts and laughter of the men, made a rare adventure.




CHAPTER XXVI



Before we quite reached the far bank the ground suddenly cleared at a
clay bottom, in which stood a deep brown water-pool, eighty yards long
and about fifteen yards wide. This was the flood-water of Abu Zereibat,
our goal. We went a few yards further, through the last scrub, and
reached the open north bank where Feisal had appointed the camp. It was
a huge plain of sand and flints, running to the very feet of Raal, with
room on it for all the armies of Arabia. So we stopped our camels, and
the slaves unloaded them and set up the tents; while we walked back to
see the mules, thirsty after their long day's march, rush with the
foot-soldiers into the pond, kicking and splashing with pleasure in the
sweet water. The abundance of fuel was an added happiness, and in
whatever place they chose to camp each group of friends had a roaring
fire--very welcome, as a wet evening mist rose eight feet out of the
ground and our woollen cloaks stiffened and grew cold with its silver
beads in their coarse woof.

It was a black night, moonless, but above the fog very brilliant with
stars. On a little mound near our tents we collected and looked over
the rolling white seas of fog. Out of it arose tent-peaks, and tall
spires of melting smoke, which became luminous underneath when the
flames licked higher into the clean air, as if driven by the noises of
the unseen army. Old Auda ibn Zuweid corrected me gravely when I said
this to him, telling me, 'It is not an army, it is a world which is
moving on Wejh'. I rejoiced at his insistence, for it had been to
create this very feeling that we had hampered ourselves with an
unwieldy crowd of men on so difficult a march.

That evening the Billi began to come in to us shyly, and swear fealty,
for the Hamdh Valley was their boundary. Amongst them Hamid el Bifada
rode up with a numerous company to pay his respects to Feisal. He told
us that his cousin, Suleiman Pasha, the paramount of the tribe, was at
Abu Ajaj, fifteen miles north of us, trying desperately for once to
make up the mind which had chopped and balanced profitably throughout a
long life. Then, without warning or parade, Sherif Nasir of Medina came
in. Feisal leaped up and embraced him, and led him over to us.

Nasir made a splendid impression, much as we had heard, and much as we
were expecting of him. He was the opener of roads, the forerunner of
Feisal's movement, the man who had fired his first shot in Medina, and
who was to fire our last shot at Muslimieh beyond Aleppo on the day
that Turkey asked for an armistice, and from beginning to end ALL that
could be told of him was good.

He was a brother of Shehad, the Emir of Medina. Their family was
descended from Hussein, the younger of Ali's children, and they were
the only descendants of Hussein considered Ashraf, not Saada. They were
Shias, and had been since the days of Kerbela, and in Hejaz were
respected only second to the Emirs of Mecca. Nasir himself was a man of
gardens, whose lot had been unwilling war since boyhood. He was now
about twenty-seven. His low, broad forehead matched his sensitive eyes,
while his weak pleasant mouth and small chin were clearly seen through
a clipped black beard.

He had been up here for two months, containing Wejh, and his last news
was that the outpost of Turkish camel corps upon our road had withdrawn
that morning towards the main defensive position.

We slept late the following day, to brace ourselves for the necessary
hours of talk. Feisal carried most of this upon his own shoulders.
Nasir supported him as second in command, and the Beidawi brothers sat
by to help. The day was bright and warm, threatening to be hot later,
and Newcombe and I wandered about looking at the watering, the men, and
the constant affluence of newcomers. When the sun was high a great
cloud of dust from the east heralded a larger party and we walked back
to the tents to see Mirzuk el Tikheimi, Feisal's sharp, mouse-featured
guest-master, ride in. He led his clansmen of the Juheina past the Emir
at a canter, to make a show. They stifled us with their dust, for his
van of a dozen sheikhs carrying a large red flag and a large white flag
drew their swords and charged round and round our tents. We admired
neither their riding nor their mares: perhaps because they were a
nuisance to us.

About noon the Wuld Mohammed Harb, and the mounted men of the ibn
Shefia battalion came in: three hundred men, under Sheikh Salih and
Mohammed ibn Shefia. Mohammed was a tubby, vulgar little man of
fifty-five, common-sensible and energetic. He was rapidly making a name
for himself in the Arab army, for he would get done any manual work. His
men were the sweepings of Wadi Yenbo, landless and without family, or
labouring Yenbo townsmen, hampered by no inherited dignity. They were
more docile than any other of our troops except the white-handed Ageyl
who were too beautiful to be made into labourers.

We were already two days behind our promise to the Navy, and Newcombe
decided to ride ahead this night to Habban. There he would meet Boyle
and explain that we must fail the HARDINGE at the rendezvous, but would
be glad if she could return there on the evening of the twenty-fourth,
when we should arrive much in need of water. He would also see if the
naval attack could not be delayed till the twenty-fifth to preserve the
joint scheme.

After dark there came a message from Suleiman Rifada, with a gift-camel
for Feisal to keep if he were friendly, and to send back if hostile.
Feisal was vexed, and protested his inability to understand so feeble a
man. Nasir asserted, 'Oh, it's because he eats fish. Fish swells the
head, and such behaviour follows'. The Syrians and Mesopotamians, and
men of Jidda and Yenbo laughed loudly, to shew that they did not share
this belief of the upland Arab, that a man of his hands was disgraced
by tasting the three mean foods--chickens, eggs and fish. Feisal said,
with mock gravity, 'You insult the company, we Wee fish'. Others
protested, We abandon it, and take refuge in God', and Mirzuk to change
the current said, 'Suleiman is an unnatural birth, neither raw nor
ripe'.

In the morning, early, we marched in a straggle for three hours down
Wadi Hamdh. Then the valley went to the left, and we struck out across
a hollow, desolate, featureless region. To-day was cold: a hard north
wind drove into our faces down the grey coast. As we marched we heard
intermittent heavy firing from the direction of Wejh, and feared that
the Navy had lost patience and were acting without us. However, we
could not make up the days we had wasted, so we pushed on for the whole
dull stage, crossing affluent after affluent of Hamdh. The plain was
striped with these wadies, all shallow and straight and bare, as many
and as intricate as the veins in a leaf. At last we re-entered Hamdh,
at Kurna, and though its clay bottoms held only mud, decided to camp.

While we were settling in there was a sudden rush. Camels had been seen
pasturing away to the east, and the energetic of the Juheina streamed
out, captured them, and drove them in. Feisal was furious, and shouted
to them to stop, but they were too excited to hear him. He snatched his
rifle, and shot at the nearest man; who, in fear, tumbled out of his
saddle, so that the others checked their course. Feisal had them up
before him, laid about the principals with his camel-stick, and
impounded the stolen camels and those of the thieves TILL the whole
tally was complete. Then he handed the beasts back to their Billi
owners. Had he not done so it would have involved the Juheina in a
private war with the Billi, our hoped-for allies of the morrow, and
might have checked extension beyond Wejh. Our success lay in bond to
such trifles.

Next morning we made for the beach, and up it to Habban at four
o'clock. The HARDINGE was duly there, to our relief, and landing water:
although the shallow bay gave little shelter, and the rough sea rolling
in made boat-work hazardous. We reserved first call for the mules, and
gave what water was left to the more thirsty of the footmen; but it was
a difficult night, and crowds of suffering men lingered jostling about
the tanks in the rays of the searchlight, hoping for another drink, if
the sailors should venture in again.

I went on board, and heard that the naval attack had been carried out
as though the land army were present, since Boyle feared the Turks
would run away if he waited. As a matter of fact, the day we reached
Abu Zereibat, Ahmed Tewflk Bey, Turkish Governor, had addressed the
garrison, saying that Wejh must be held to the last drop of blood. Then
at dusk he had got on to his camel and ridden off to the railway with
the few mounted men fit for flight. The two hundred infantry determined
to do his abandoned duty against the landing party; but they were
outnumbered three to one, and the naval gun-fire was too heavy to let
them make proper use of their positions. So far as the HARDINGE knew, the
fighting was not ended, but Wejh town had been occupied by seamen and
Saleh's Arabs.




CHAPTER XXVII



Profitable rumours excited the army, which began to trickle off
northward soon after midnight. At dawn we rallied the various
contingents in Wadi Miya, twelve miles south of the town, and advanced
on it in order, meeting a few scattered Turks, of whom one party put up
a short resistance. The Ageyl dismounted, to strip off their cloaks,
head-cloths and shirts; and went on in brown half-nakedness, which they
said would ensure clean wounds if they were hit: also their precious
clothes would not be damaged. Ibn Dakhil in command obtained a quiet
regularity of obedience. They advanced by alternate companies, in open
order, at intervals of four or five yards, with even-numbered companies
in support, making good use of the poor cover which existed.

It was pretty to look at the neat, brown men in the sunlit sandy
valley, with the turquoise pool of salt water in the midst to set off
the crimson banners which two standard bearers carried in the van. They
went along in a steady lope, covering the ground at nearly six miles an
hour, dead silent, and reached and climbed the ridge without a shot
fired. So we knew the work had been finished for us and trotted forward
to find the boy Saleh, son of ibn Shefia, in possession of the town. He
told us that his casualties had been nearly twenty killed; and later we
heard that a British lieutenant of the Air Service had been mortally
wounded in a seaplane reconnaissance, and one British seaman hurt in
the foot.

Vickery, who had directed the battle, was satisfied, but I could not
share his satisfaction. To me an unnecessary action, or shot, or
casualty, was not only waste but sin. I was unable to take the
professional view that all successful actions were gains. Our rebels
were not materials, like soldiers, but friends of ours, trusting our
leadership. We were not in command nationally, but by invitation; and
our men were volunteers, individuals, local men, relatives, so that a
death was a personal sorrow to many in the army. Even from the purely
military point of view the assault seemed to me a blunder.

The two hundred Turks in Wejh had no transport and no food, and if left
alone a few days must have surrendered. Had they escaped, it would not
have mattered the value of an Arab life. We wanted Wejh as a base
against the railway and to extend our front; the smashing and killing
in it had been wanton.

The place was inconveniently smashed. Its townspeople had been warned
by Feisal of the coming attack, and advised either to forestall it by
revolt or to clear out; but they were mostly Egyptians from Kosseir,
who preferred the Turks to us, and decided to wait the issue; so the
Shefia men and the Biasha found the houses packed with fair booty and
made a sweep of it. They robbed the shops, broke open doors, searched
every room, smashed chests and cupboards, tore down all fixed fittings,
and slit each mattress and pillow for hidden treasure; while the fire
of the fleet punched large holes in every prominent wall or building.

Our main difficulty was the landing of stores. The FOX had sunk the
local lighters and rowing boats and there was no sort of quay; but the
resourceful HARDINGE thrust herself into the harbour (which was wide
enough but much too short) and landed our stuff in her own cutters. We
raised a tired working party of ibn Shefia followers, and with their
clumsy or languid help got enough food into the place for the moment's
needs. The townspeople had returned hungry, and furious at the state of
what had been their property; and began their revenge by stealing
everything unguarded, even slitting open the rice-bags on the beach and
carrying away quantities in their held-up skirts. Feisal corrected this
by making the pitiless Maulud Town-governor. He brought in his
rough-riders and in one day of wholesale arrest and summary punishment
persuaded everyone to leave things alone. After that Wejh had the
silence of fear.

Even in the few days which elapsed before I left for Cairo the profits
of our spectacular march began to come in. The Arab movement had now no
opponent in Western Arabia, and had passed beyond danger of collapse.
The vexed Rabegh question died: and we had learnt the first rules of
Beduin warfare. When regarded backward from our benefits of new
knowledge the deaths of those regretted twenty men in the Wejh streets
seemed not so terrible. Vickery's impatience was justified, perhaps, in
cold blood.





BOOK THREE. A Railway Diversion




CHAPTERS XXVIII TO XXXVIII



OUR TAKING WEJH HAD THE WISHED EFFECT UPON THE TURKS, WHO ABANDONED
THEIR ADVANCE TOWARDS MECCA FOR A PASSIVE DEFENCE OF MEDINA AND ITS
RAILWAY. OUR EXPERTS MADE PLANS FOR ATTACKING THEM.

THE GERMANS SAW THE DANGER OF ENVELOPMENT, AND PERSUADED ENVER TO ORDER
THE INSTANT EVACUATION OF MEDINA. SIR ARCHIBALD MURRAY BEGGED US TO PUT
IN A SUSTAINED ATTACK TO DESTROY THE RETREATING ENEMY.

FEISAL WAS SOON READY IN HIS PART: AND I WENT OFF TO ABDULLA TO GET HIS
CO-OPERATION. ON THE WAY I FELL SICK AND WHILE LYING ALONE WITH EMPTY
HANDS WAS DRIVEN TO THINK ABOUT THE CAMPAIGN. THINKING CONVINCED ME
THAT OUR RECENT PRACTICE HAD BEEN BETTER THAN OUR THEORY.

SO ON RECOVERY I DID LITTLE TO THE RAILWAY, BUT WENT BACK TO WEJH WITH
NOVEL IDEAS. I TRIED TO MAKE THE OTHERS ADMIT THEM, AND ADOPT
DEPLOYMENT AS OUR RULING PRINCIPLE; AND TO PUT PREACHING EVEN BEFORE
FIGHTING. THEY PREFERRED THE LIMITED AND DIRECT OBJECTIVE OF MEDINA. SO
I DECIDED TO SLIP OFF TO AKABA BY MYSELF ON TEST OF MY OWN THEORY.




CHAPTER XXVIII



In Cairo the yet-hot authorities promised gold, rifles, mules, more
machine-guns, and mountain guns; but these last, of course, we never
got. The gun question was an eternal torment. Because of the hilly,
trackless country, field guns were no use to us; and the British Army
had no mountain guns except the Indian ten-pounder, which was
serviceable only against bows and arrows. Bremond had some excellent
Schneider sixty-fives at Suez, with Algerian gunners, but he regarded
them principally as his lever to move allied troops into Arabia. When
we asked him to send them down to us with or without men, he would
reply, first that the Arabs would not treat the crews properly, and
then that they would not treat the guns properly. His price was a
British brigade for Rabegh; and we would not pay it.

He feared to make the Arab Army formidable--an argument one could
understand--but the case of the British Government was incomprehensible.
It was not ill-will, for they gave us all else we wanted; nor was it
niggardliness, for their total help to the Arabs, in materials and
money, exceeded ten millions. I believe it was sheer stupidity. But it
was maddening to be unequal to many enterprises and to fail in others,
for the technical reason that we could not keep down the Turkish
artillery because its guns outranged ours by three or four thousand
yards. In the end, happily, Bremond over-reached himself, after keeping
his batteries idle for a year at Suez. Major Cousse, his successor,
ordered them down to us, and by their help we entered Damascus. During
that idle year they had been, to each Arab officer who entered Suez, a
silent incontrovertible proof of French malice towards the Arab
movement.

We received a great reinforcement to our cause in Jaafar Pasha, a
Bagdadi officer from the Turkish Army. After distinguished service in
the German and Turkish armies, he had been chosen by Enver to organize
the levies of the Sheikh el Senussi. He went there by submarine, made a
decent force of the wild men, and showed tactical ability against the
British in two battles. Then he was captured and lodged in the citadel
at Cairo with the other officer prisoners of war. He escaped one night,
slipping down a blanket-rope towards the moat; but the blankets failed
under the strain, and in the fall he hurt his ankle, and was re-taken
helpless. In hospital he gave his parole, and was enlarged after paying
for the torn blanket. But one day he read in an Arabic newspaper of the
Sherif s revolt, and of the execution by the Turks of prominent Arab
Nationalists--his friends--and realized that he had been on the wrong
side.

Feisal had heard of him, of course, and wanted him as commander-in-chief
of his regular troops, whose improvement was now our main effort.
We knew that Jaafar was one of the few men with enough of reputation
and personality to weld their difficult and reciprocally disagreeable
elements into an army. King Hussein, however, would not have it. He was
old and narrow, and disliked Mesopotamians and Syrians: Mecca must
deliver Damascus. He refused the services of Jaafar. Feisal had to
accept him on his own responsibility.

In Cairo were Hogarth and George Lloyd, and Storrs and Deedes, and many
old friends. Beyond them the circle of Arabian well-wishers was now
strangely increased. In the army our shares rose as we showed profits.
Lynden Bell stood firmly our friend and swore that method was coming
out of the Arab madness. Sir Archibald Murray realized with a sudden
shock that more Turkish troops were fighting the Arabs than were
fighting him, and began to remember how he had always favoured the Arab
revolt. Admiral Wemyss was as ready to help now as he had been in our
hard days round Rabegh. Sir Reginald Wingate, High Commissioner in
Egypt, was happy in the success of the work he had advocated for years.
I grudged him this happiness; for McMahon, who took the actual risk of
starting it, had been broken just before prosperity began. However,
that was hardly Wingate's fault.

In the midst of my touching the slender stops of all these quills there
came a rude surprise. Colonel Bremond called to felicitate me on the
capture of Wejh, saying that it confirmed his belief in my military
talent and encouraged him to expect my help in an extension of our
success. He wanted to occupy Akaba with an Anglo-French force and naval
help. He pointed out the importance of Akaba, the only Turkish port
left in the Red Sea, the nearest to the Suez Canal, the nearest to the
Hejaz Railway, on the left flank of the Beersheba army; suggesting its
occupation by a composite brigade, which should advance up Wadi Itm for
a crushing blow at Maan. He began to enlarge on the nature of the
ground.

I told him that I knew Akaba from before the war, and felt that his
scheme was technically impossible. We could take the beach of the gulf;
but our forces there, as unfavourably placed as on a Gallipoli beach,
would be under observation and gun-fire from the coastal hills: and
these granite hills, thousands of feet high, were impracticable for
heavy troops: the passes through them being formidable defiles, very
costly to assault or to cover. In my opinion, Akaba, whose importance
was all and more than he said, would be best taken by Arab irregulars
descending from the interior without naval help.

Bremond did not tell me (but I knew) that he wanted the landing at
Akaba to head off the Arab movement, by getting a mixed force in front
of them (as at Rabegh), so that they might be confined to Arabia, and
compelled to waste their efforts against Medina. The Arabs still feared
that the Sherif s alliance with us was based on a secret agreement to
sell them at the end, and such a Christian invasion would have
confirmed these fears and destroyed their cooperation. For my part, I
did not tell Bremond (but he knew) that I meant to defeat his efforts
and to take the Arabs soon into Damascus. It amused me, this
childishly-conceived rivalry of vital aims, but he ended his talk
ominously by saying that, anyhow, he was going down to put the scheme
to Feisal in Wejh.

Now, I had not warned Feisal that Bremond was a politician. Newcombe
was in Wejh, with his friendly desire to get moves on. We had not
talked over the problem of Akaba. Feisal knew neither its terrain nor
its tribes. Keenness and ignorance would lend an ear favourable to the
proposal. It seemed best for me to hurry down there and put my side on
its guard, so I left the same afternoon for Suez and sailed that night.
Two days later, in Wejh, I explained myself; so that when Bremond came
after ten days and opened his heart, or part of it, to Feisal, his
tactics were returned to him with improvements.

The Frenchman began by presenting six Hotchkiss automatics complete
with instructors. This was a noble gift; but Feisal took the
opportunity to ask him to increase his bounty by a battery of the
quick-firing mountain guns at Suez, explaining that he had been sorry
to leave the Yenbo area for Wejh, since Wejh was so much further from
his objective--Medina--but it was really impossible for him to assault
the Turks (who had French artillery) with rifles or with the old guns
supplied him by the British Army. His men had not the technical
excellence to make a bad tool prevail over a good one. He had to
exploit his only advantages--numbers and mobility--and, unless his
equipment could be improved, there was no saying where this protraction
of his front might end!

Bremond tried to turn it off by belittling guns as useless for Hejaz
warfare (quite right, this, practically). But it would end the war at
once if Feisal made his men climb about the country like goats and tear
up the railway. Feisal, angry at the metaphor (impolite in Arabic),
looked at Bremond's six feet of comfortable body, and asked if he had
ever tried to 'goat' himself. Bremond referred gallantly to the
question of Akaba, and the real danger to the Arabs in the Turks
remaining there: insisting that the British, who had the means for an
expedition thither, should be pressed to undertake it. Feisal, in
reply, gave him a geographical sketch of the land behind Akaba (I
recognized the less dashing part of it myself) and explained the tribal
difficulties and the food problem--all the points which made it a
serious obstacle. He ended by saying that, after the cloud of orders,
counter-orders and confusion over the allied troops for Rabegh, he
really had not the face to approach Sir Archibald Murray so soon with
another request for an excursion.

Bremond had to retire from the battle in good order, getting in a
Parthian shot at me, where I sat spitefully smiling, by begging Feisal
to insist that the British armoured cars in Suez be sent down to Wejh.
But even this was a boomerang, since they had started! After he had
gone, I returned to Cairo for a cheerful week, in which I gave my
betters much good advice. Murray, who had growlingly earmarked
Tullibardine's brigade for Akaba, approved me still further when I
declared against that side-show too. Then to Wejh.




CHAPTER XXIX



Life in Wejh was interesting. We had now set our camp in order. Feisal
pitched his tents (here an opulent group: living tents, reception
tents, staff tents, guest tents, servants') about a mile from the sea,
on the edge of the coral shelf which ran up gently from the beach till
it ended in a steep drop facing east and south over broad valleys
radiating star-like from the land-locked harbour. The tents of soldiers
and tribesmen were grouped in these sandy valleys, leaving the chill
height for ourselves; and very delightful in the evening we northerners
found it when the breeze from the sea carried us a murmur of the waves,
faint and far off, like the echo of traffic up a by-street in London.

Immediately beneath us were the Ageyl, an irregular close group of
tents. South of these were Rasim's artillery; and by him for company,
Abdulla's machine-gunners, in regular lines, with their animals
picketed out in those formal rows which were incense to the
professional officer and convenient if space were precious. Further out
the market was set plainly on the ground, a boiling swell of men always
about the goods. The scattered tents and shelters of the tribesmen
filled each gully or windless place. Beyond the last of them lay open
country, with camel-parties coming in and out by the straggling palms
of the nearest, too-brackish well. As background were the foothills,
reefs and clusters like ruined castles, thrown up craggily to the
horizon of the coastal range.

As it was the custom in Wejh to camp wide apart, very wide apart, my
life was spent in moving back and forth, to Feisal's tents, to the
English tents, to the Egyptian Army tents, to the town, the port, the
wireless station, tramping all day restlessly up and down these coral
paths in sandals or barefoot, hardening my feet, getting by slow
degrees the power to walk with little pain over sharp and burning
ground, tempering my already trained body for greater endeavour.

Poor Arabs wondered why I had no mare; and I forbore to puzzle them by
incomprehensible talk of hardening myself, or confess I would rather
walk than ride for sparing of animals: yet the first was true and the
second true. Something hurtful to my pride, disagreeable, rose at the
sight of these lower forms of life. Their existence struck a servile
reflection upon our human kind: the style in which a God would look on
us; and to make use of them, to lie under an avoidable obligation to
them, seemed to me shameful. It was as with the negroes, tom-tom
playing themselves to red madness each night under the ridge. Their
faces, being clearly different from our own, were tolerable; but it
hurt that they should possess exact counterparts of all our bodies.

Feisal, within, laboured day and night at his politics, in which so few
of us could help. Outside, the crowd employed and diverted us with
parades, joy-shooting, and marches of victory. Also there were
accidents. Once a group, playing behind our tents, set off a seaplane
bomb, dud relic of Boyle's capture of the town. In the explosion their
limbs were scattered about the camp, marking the canvas with red
splashes which soon turned a dull brown and then faded pale. Feisal had
the tents changed and ordered the bloody ones to be destroyed: the
frugal slaves washed them. Another day a tent took fire, and part-roasted
three of our guests. The camp crowded round and roared with laughter
till the fire died down, and then, rather shamefacedly, we cared
for their hurts. The third day, a mare was wounded by a faffing
joy-bullet, and many tents were pierced.

One night the Ageyl mutinied against their commandant, ibn Dakhil, for
fining them too generally and flogging them too severely. They rushed
his tent, howling and shooting, threw his things about and beat his
servants. That not being enough to blunt their fury, they began to
remember Yenbo, and went off to kill the Ateiba. Feisal from our bluff
saw their torches and ran barefoot amongst them, laying on with the
flat of his sword like four men. His fury delayed them while the slaves
and horsemen, calling for help, dashed downhill with rushes and shouts
and blows of sheathed swords. One gave him a horse on which he charged
down the ringleaders, while we dispersed groups by firing Very lights
into their clothing. Only two were killed and thirty wounded. Ibn
Dakhil resigned next day.

Murray had given us two armoured-cars, Rolls-Royces, released from the
campaign in East Africa. Gilman and Wade commanded, and their crews
were British, men from the A.S.C. to drive and from the Machine Gun
Corps to shoot. Having them in Wejh made things more difficult for us,
because the food we had been eating and the water we had been drinking
were at once medically condemned; but English company was a balancing
pleasure, and the occupation of pushing cars and motor-bicycles through
the desperate sand about Wejh was great. The fierce difficulty of
driving across country gave the men arms like boxers, so that they
swung their shoulders professionally as they walked. With time they
became skilled, developing a style and art of sand-driving, which got
them carefully over the better ground and rushed them at speed over
soft places. One of these soft places was the last twenty miles of
plain in front of Jebel Raal. The cars used to cross it in little more
than half an hour, leaping from ridge to ridge of the dunes and swaying
dangerously around their curves. The Arabs loved the new toys. Bicycles
they called devil-horses, the children of cars, which themselves were
sons and daughters of trains. It gave us three generations of
mechanical transport.

The Navy added greatly to our interests in Wejh. The ESPIEGLE was sent
by Boyle as station ship, with the delightful orders to 'do everything
in her power to co-operate in the many plans which would be suggested
to her by Colonel Newcombe, while letting it be clearly seen that she
was conferring a favour'. Her commander Fitzmaurice (a good name in
Turkey), was the soul of hospitality and found quiet amusement in our
work on shore. He helped us in a thousand ways; above all in
signalling; for he was a wireless expert, and one day at noon the
NORTHBROOK came in and landed an army wireless set, on a light lorry,
for us. As there was no one to explain it, we were at a loss; but
Fitzmaurice raced ashore with half his crew, ran the car to a fitting
site, rigged the masts professionally, started the engine, and
connected up to such effect that before sunset he had called the
astonished NORTHBROOK and held a long conversation with her operator.
The station increased the efficiency of the base at Wejh and was busy
day and night, filling the Red Sea with messages in three tongues, and
twenty different sorts of army cypher-codes.




CHAPTER XXX



Fakhri Pasha was still playing our game. He held an entrenched line
around Medina, just far enough out to make it impossible for the Arabs
to shell the city. (Such an attempt was never made or imagined. ) The
other troops were being distributed along the railway, in strong
garrisons at all water stations between Medina and Tebuk, and in
smaller posts between these garrisons, so that daily patrols might
guarantee the track. In short, he had fallen back on as stupid a
defensive as could be conceived. Garland had gone south-east from Wejh,
and Newcombe north-east, to pick holes in it with high explosives. They
would cut rails and bridges, and place automatic mines for running
trains.

The Arabs had passed from doubt to violent optimism, and were promising
exemplary service. Feisal enrolled most of the Billi, and the Moahib,
which made him master of Arabia between the railway and the sea. He
then sent the Juheina to Abdulla in Wadi Ais.

He could now prepare to deal solemnly with the Hejaz Railway; but with
a practice better than my principles, I begged him first to delay in
Wejh and set marching an intense movement among the tribes beyond us,
that in the future our revolt might be extended, and the railway
threatened from Tebuk (our present limit of influence) northward as far
as Maan. My vision of the course of the Arab war was still purblind. I
had not seen that the preaching was victory and the fighting a
delusion. For the moment, I roped them together, and, as Feisal
fortunately liked changing men's minds rather than breaking railways,
the preaching went the better.

With his northern neighbours, the coastal Howeitat, he had already made
a beginning: but we now sent to the Beni Atiyeh, a stronger people to
the north-east; and gained a great step when the chief, Asi ibn Atiyeh,
came in and swore allegiance. His main motive was jealousy of his
brothers, so that we did not expect from him active help; but the bread
and salt with him gave us freedom of movement across his tribe's
territory. Beyond lay various tribes owning obedience to Nuri Shaalan,
the great Emir of the Ruwalla, who, after the Sherif and ibn Saud and
ibn Rashid, was the fourth figure among the precarious princes of the
desert.

Nuri was an old man, who had ruled his Anazeh tribesmen for thirty
years. His was the chief family of the Rualla, but Nuri had no
precedence among them at birth, nor was he loved, nor a great man of
battle. His headship had been acquired by sheer force of character. To
gain it he had killed two of his brothers. Later he had added Sherarat
and others to the number of his followers, and in all their desert his
word was absolute law. He had none of the wheedling diplomacy of the
ordinary sheikh; a word, and there was an end of opposition, or of his
opponent. All feared and obeyed him; to use his roads we must have his
countenance.

Fortunately, this was easy. Feisal had secured it years ago, and had
retained it by interchange of gifts from Medina and Yenbo. Now, from
Wejh, Faiz el Ghusein went up to him and on the way crossed ibn Dughmi,
one of the chief men of the Ruwalla, coming down to us with the
desirable gift of some hundreds of good baggage camels. Nuri, of
course, still kept friendly with the Turks. Damascus and Bagdad were
his markets, and they could have half-starved his tribe in three
months, had they suspected him; but we knew that when the moment came
we should have his armed help, and till then anything short of a breach
with Turkey.

His favour would open to us the Sirhan, a famous roadway, camping
ground, and chain of water-holes, which in a series of linked
depressions extended from Jauf, Nun's capital, in the south-east,
northwards to Azrak, near Jebel Druse, in Syria. It was the freedom of
the Sirhan we needed to reach the tents of the Eastern Howeitat, those
famous abu Tayi, of whom Auda, the greatest fighting man in northern
Arabia, was chief. Only by means of Auda abu Tayi could we swing the
tribes from Maan to Akaba so violently in our favour that they would
help us take Akaba and its hills from their Turkish garrisons: only
with his active support could we venture to thrust out from Wejh on the
long trek to Maan. Since our Yenbo days we had been longing for him and
trying to win him to our cause.

We made a great step forward at Wejh; ibn Zaal, his cousin and a
war-leader of the abu Tayi, arrived on the seventeenth of February, which
was in all respects a fortunate day. At dawn there came in five chief
men of the Sherarat from the desert east of Tebuk, bringing a present
of eggs of the Arabian ostrich, plentiful in their little-frequented
desert. After them, the slaves showed in Dhaif-Allah, abu Tiyur, a
cousin of Hamd ibn Jazi, paramount of the central Howeitat of the Maan
plateau. These were numerous and powerful; splendid fighters; but blood
enemies of their cousins, the nomad abu Tayi, because of an old-grounded
quarrel between Auda and Hamd. We were proud to see them
coming thus far to greet us, yet not content, for they were less fit
than the abu Tayi for our purposed attack against Akaba.

On their heels came a cousin of Nawwaf, Nuri Shaalan's eldest son, with
a mare sent by Nawwaf to Feisal. The Shaalan and the Jazi, being
hostile, hardened eyes at one another; so we divided the parties and
improvised a new guest-camp. After the Rualla, was announced the abu
Tageiga chief of the sedentary Howeitat of the coast. He brought his
tribe's respectful homage and the spoils of Dhaba and Moweilleh, the
two last Turkish outlets on the Red Sea. Room was made for him on
Feisal's carpet, and the warmest thanks rendered him for his tribe's
activity; which carried us to the borders of Akaba, by tracks too rough
for operations of force, but convenient for preaching, and still more
so for getting news.

In the afternoon, ibn Zaal arrived, with ten other of Auda's chief
followers. He kissed Feisal's hand once for Auda and then once for
himself, and, sitting back, declared that he came from Auda to present
his salutations and to ask for orders. Feisal, with policy, controlled
his outward joy, and introduced him gravely to his blood enemies, the
Jazi Howeitat. Ibn Zaal acknowledged them distantly. Later, we held
great private conversations with him and dismissed him with rich gifts,
richer promises, and Feisal's own message to Auda that his mind would
not be smooth till he had seen him face to face in Wejh. Auda was an
immense chivalrous name, but an unknown quantity to us, and in so vital
a matter as Akaba we could not afford a mistake. He must come down that
we might weigh him, and frame our future plans actually in his
presence, and with his help.

Except that all its events were happy, this day was not essentially
unlike Feisal's every day. The rush of news made my diary fat. The
roads to Wejh swarmed with envoys and volunteers and great sheikhs
riding in to swear allegiance. The contagion of their constant passage
made the lukewarm Billi ever more profitable to us. Feisal swore new
adherents solemnly on the Koran between his hands, 'to wait while he
waited, march when he marched, to yield obedience to no Turk, to deal
kindly with all who spoke Arabic (whether Bagdadi, Aleppine, Syrian, or
pure-blooded) and to put independence above life, family, and goods'.

He also began to confront them at once, in his presence, with their
tribal enemies, and to compose their feuds. An account of profit and
loss would be struck between the parties, with Feisal modulating and
interceding between them, and often paying the balance, or contributing
towards it from his own funds, to hurry on the pact. During two years
Feisal so laboured daily, putting together and arranging in their
natural order the innumerable tiny pieces which made up Arabian
society, and combining them into his one design of war against the
Turks. There was no blood feud left active in any of the districts
through which he had passed, and he was Court of Appeal, ultimate and
unchallenged, for western Arabia.

He showed himself worthy of this achievement. He never gave a partial
decision, nor a decision so impracticably just that it must lead to
disorder. No Arab ever impugned his judgements, or questioned his
wisdom and competence in tribal business. By patiently sifting out
right and wrong, by his tact, his wonderful memory, he gained authority
over the nomads from Medina to Damascus and beyond. He was recognized
as a force transcending tribe, superseding blood chiefs, greater than
jealousies. The Arab movement became in the best sense national, since
within it all Arabs were at one, and for it private interests must be
set aside; and in this movement chief place, by right of application
and by right of ability, had been properly earned by the man who filled
it for those few weeks of triumph and longer months of disillusion
after Damascus had been set free.




CHAPTER XXXI



Urgent messages from Clayton broke across this cheerful work with
orders to wait in Wejh for two days and meet the NUR EL BAHR, an
Egyptian patrol ship, coming down with news. I was not well and waited
with more excellent grace. She arrived on the proper day, and
disembarked MacRury, who gave me a copy of long telegraphic
instructions from Jemal Pasha to Fakhri in Medina. These, emanating
from Enver and the German staff in Constantinople, ordered the instant
abandonment of Medina, and evacuation of the troops by route march in
mass, first to Hedia, thence to El Ula, thence to Tebuk, and finally to
Maan, where a fresh rail-head and entrenched position would be
constituted.

This move would have suited the Arabs excellently; but our army of
Egypt was perturbed at the prospect of twenty-five thousand Anatolian
troops, with far more than the usual artillery of a corps, descending
suddenly on the Beersheba front. Clayton, in his letter, told me the
development was to be treated with the utmost concern, and every effort
made to capture Medina, or to destroy the garrison when they came out.
Newcombe was on the line, doing a vigorous demolition-series, so that
the moment's responsibility fell on me. I feared that little could be
done in time, for the message was days old, and the evacuation timed to
begin at once.

We told Feisal the frank position, and that Allied interests in this
case demanded the sacrifice, or at least the postponement of immediate
advantage to the Arabs. He rose, as ever, to a proposition of honour,
and agreed instantly to do his best. We worked out our possible
resources and arranged to move them into contact with the railway.
Sherif Mastur, an honest, quiet old man, and Rasim, with tribesmen,
mule-mounted infantry, and a gun, were to proceed directly to Fagair,
the first good water-base north of Wadi Ais, to hold up our first
section of railway, from Abdulla's area northward.

Ali ibn el Hussein, from Jeida, would attack the next section of line
northward from Mastur. We told ibn Mahanna to get close to El Ula, and
watch it. We ordered Sherif Nasir to stay near Kalaat el Muadhdham, and
keep his men in hand for an effort. I wrote asking Newcombe to come in
for news. Old Mohammed Ali was to move from Dhaba to an oasis near
Tebuk, so that if the evacuation got so far we should be ready. All our
hundred and fifty miles of line would thus be beset, while Feisal
himself, at Wejh, stood ready to bring help to whatever sector most
needed him.

My part was to go off to Abdulla in Wadi Ais, to find out why he had
done nothing for two months, and to persuade him, if the Turks came
out, to go straight at them. I hoped we might deter them from moving by
making so many small raids on this lengthy line that traffic would be
seriously disorganized, and the collection of the necessary food-dumps
for the army at each main stage be impracticable. The Medina force,
being short of animal transport, could carry little with them. Enver
had instructed them to put guns and stores on trains; and to enclose
these trains in their columns and march together up the railway. It was
an unprecedented manoeuvre, and if we gained ten days to get in place,
and they then attempted anything so silly, we should have a chance of
destroying them all.

Next day I left Wejh, ill and unfit for a long march, while Feisal in
his haste and many preoccupations had chosen me a travelling party of
queer fellows. There were four Rifaa and one Merawi Ju-heina as guides,
and Arslan, a Syrian soldier-servant, who prepared bread and rice for
me and acted besides as butt to the Arabs; four Ageyl, a Moor, and an
Ateibi, Suleiman. The camels, thin with the bad grazing of this dry
Billi territory, would have to go slowly.

Delay after delay took place in our starting, until nine at night, and
then we moved unwillingly: but I was determined to get clear of Wejh
somehow before morning. So we went four hours and slept. Next day we
did two stages of five hours each, and camped at Abu Zereibat, in our
old ground of the winter. The great pool had shrunk little in the two
months, but was noticeably more salt. A few weeks later it was unfit to
drink. A shallow well near by was said to afford tolerable water. I did
not look for it, since boils on my back and heavy fever made painful
the jolting of the camel, and I was tired.

Long before dawn we rode away, and having crossed Hamdh got confused in
the broken surfaces of Agunna, an area of low hills. When day broke we
recovered direction and went over a watershed steeply down into El
Khubt, a hill-locked plain extending to the Sukhur, the granite bubbles
of hills which had been prominent on our road up from Um Lejj. The
ground was luxuriant with colocynth, whose runners and fruits looked
festive in the early light. The Ju-heina said both leaves and stalks
were excellent food for such horses as would eat them, and defended
from thirst for many hours. The Ageyl said that the best aperient was
to drink camel-milk from cups of the scooped-out rind. The Ateibi said
that he was sufficiently moved if he just rubbed the juice of the fruit
on the soles of his feet. The Moor Hamed said that the dried pith made
good tinder. On one point however they were all agreed, that the whole
plant was useless or poisonous as fodder for camels.

This talk carried us across the Khubt, a pleasant three miles, and
through a low ridge into a second smaller section. We now saw that, of
the Sukhur, two stood together to the north-east, great grey striated
piles of volcanic rock, reddish coloured where protected from the
burning of the sun and the bruising of sandy winds. The third Sakhara,
which stood a little apart, was the bubble rock which had roused my
curiosity. Seen from near by, it more resembled a huge football
half-buried in the ground. It, too, was brown in colour. The south and
east faces were quite smooth and unbroken, and its regular, domed head
was polished and shining and had fine cracks running up and over it like
stitched seams: altogether one of the strangest hills in Hejaz, a
country of strange hills. We rode gently towards it, through a thin
shower of rain which came slanting strangely and beautifully across the
sunlight.

Our path took up between the Sakhara and the Sukhur by a narrow gorge
with sandy floor and steep bare walls. Its head was rough. We had to
scramble up shelves of coarse-faced stone, and along a great fault in
the hill-side between two tilted red reefs of hard rock. The summit of
the pass was a knife-edge, and from it we went down an encumbered gap,
half-blocked by one fallen boulder which had been hammered over with
the tribal marks of all the generations of men who had used this road.
Afterwards there opened tree-grown spaces, collecting grounds in winter
for the sheets of rain which poured off the glazed sides of the Sukhur.
There were granite outcrops here and there, and a fine silver sand
underfoot in the still damp water-channels. The drainage was towards
Heiran.

We then entered a wild confusion of granite shards, piled up haphazard
into low mounds, in and out of which we wandered any way we could find
practicable going for our hesitating camels. Soon after noon this gave
place to a broad wooded valley, up which we rode for an hour, till our
troubles began again; for we had to dismount and lead our animals up a
narrow hill-path with broken steps of rock so polished by long years of
passing feet that they were dangerous in wet weather. They took us over
a great shoulder of the hills and down among more small mounds and
valleys, and afterwards by another rocky zigzag descent into a
torrent-bed. This soon became too confined to admit the passage of laden
camels, and the path left it to cling precariously to the hill-side
with a cliff above and cliff below. After fifteen minutes of this we
were glad to reach a high saddle on which former travellers had piled
little cairns of commemoration and thankfulness. Of such a nature had
been the road-side cairns of Masturah, on my first Arabian journey,
from Rabegh to Feisal.

We stopped to add one to the number, and then rode down a sandy valley
into Wadi Hanbag, a large, well-wooded tributary of Hamdh. After the
broken country in which we had been prisoned for hours, the openness of
Hanbag was refreshing. Its clean white bed swept on northward through
the trees in a fine curve under precipitous hills of red and brown,
with views for a mile or two up and down its course. There were green
weeds and grass growing on the lower sand-slopes of the tributary, and
we stopped there for half an hour to let our starved camels eat the
juicy, healthy stuff.

They had not so enjoyed themselves since Bir el Waheidi, and tore at it
ravenously, stowing it away unchewed inside them, pending a fit time
for leisurely digestion. We then crossed the valley to a great branch
opposite our entry. This Wadi Eitan was also beautiful. Its shingle
face, without loose rocks, was plentifully grown over with trees. On
the right were low hills, on the left great heights called the Jidhwa,
in parallel ridges of steep broken granite, very red now that the sun
was setting amid massed cloud-banks of boding rain.

At last we camped, and when the camels were unloaded and driven out to
pasture, I lay down under the rocks and rested. My body was very sore
with headache and high fever, the accompaniments of a sharp attack of
dysentery which had troubled me along the march and had laid me out
twice that day in short fainting fits, when the more difficult parts of
the climb had asked too much of my strength. Dysentery of this Arabian
coast sort used to fall like a hammer blow, and crush its victims for a
few hours, after which the extreme effects passed off; but it left men
curiously tired, and subject for some weeks to sudden breaks of nerve.

My followers had been quarrelling all day; and while I was lying near
the rocks a shot was fired. I paid no attention; for there were hares
and birds in the valley; but a little later Suleiman roused me and made
me follow him across the valley to an opposite bay in the rocks, where
one of the Ageyl, a Boreida man, was lying stone dead with a bullet
through his temples. The shot must have been fired from close by;
because the skin was burnt about one wound. The remaining Ageyl were
running frantically about; and when I asked what it was Ali, their head
man, said that Hamed the Moor had done the murder. I suspected
Suleiman, because of the feud between the Atban and Ageyl which had
burned up in Yenbo and Wejh; but Ah' assured me that Suleiman had been
with him three hundred yards further up the valley gathering sticks
when the shot was fired. I sent all out to search for Hamed, and
crawled back to the baggage, feeling that it need not have happened
this day of all days when I was in pain.

As I lay there I heard a rustle, and opened my eyes slowly upon Hamed's
back as he stooped over his saddle-bags, which lay just beyond my rock.
I covered him with a pistol and then spoke. He had put down his rifle
to lift the gear; and was at my mercy till the others came. We held a
court at once; and after a while Hamed confessed that, he and Salem
having had words, he had seen red and shot him suddenly. Our inquiry
ended. The Ageyl, as relatives of the dead man, demanded blood for
blood. The others supported them; and I tried vainly to talk the gentle
Ali round. My head was aching with fever and I could not think; but
hardly even in health, with all eloquence, could I have begged Hamed
off; for Salem had been a friendly fellow and his sudden murder a
wanton crime.

Then rose up the horror which would make civilized man shun justice
like a plague if he had not the needy to serve him as hangmen for
wages. There were other Moroccans in our army; and to let the Ageyl
kill one in feud meant reprisals by which our unity would have been
endangered. It must be a formal execution, and at last, desperately, I
told Hamed that he must die for punishment, and laid the burden of his
killing on myself. Perhaps they would count me not qualified for feud.
At least no revenge could lie against my followers; for I was a
stranger and kinless.

I made him enter a narrow gully of the spur, a dank twilight place
overgrown with weeds. Its sandy bed had been pitted by trickles of
water down the cliffs in the late rain. At the end it shrank to a crack
a few inches wide. The walls were vertical. I stood in the entrance and
gave him a few moments' delay which he spent crying on the ground. Then
I made him rise and shot him through the chest. He fell down on the
weeds shrieking, with the blood coming out in spurts over his clothes,
and jerked about till he rolled nearly to where I was. I fired again,
but was shaking so that I only broke his wrist. He went on calling out,
less loudly, now lying on his back with his feet towards me, and I
leant forward and shot him for the last time in the thick of his neck
under the jaw. His body shivered a little, and I called the Ageyl, who
buried him in the gully where he was. Afterwards the wakeful night
dragged over me, till, hours before dawn, I had the men up and made
them load, in my longing to be set free of Wadi Kitan. They had to lift
me into the saddle.




CHAPTER XXXII



Dawn found us crossing a steep short pass out of Wadi Kitan into the
main drainage valley of these succeeding hills. We turned aside into
Wadi Reimi, a tributary, to get water. There was no proper well, only a
seepage hole in the stony bed of the valley; and we found it partly by
our noses: though the taste, while as foul, was curiously unlike the
smell. We refilled our water-skins. Arslan baked bread, and we rested
for two hours. Then we went on through Wadi Amk, an easy green valley
which made comfortable marching for the camels.

When the Amk turned westward we crossed it, going up between piles of
the warped grey granite (like cold toffee) which was common up-country
in the Hejaz. The defile culminated at the foot of a natural ramp and
staircase: badly broken, twisting, and difficult for camels, but short.
Afterwards we were in an open valley for an hour, with low hills to the
right and mountains to the left. There were water pools in the crags,
and Merawin tents under the fine trees which studded the flat. The
fertility of the slopes was great: on them grazed flocks of sheep and
goats. We got milk from the Arabs: the first milk my Ageyl had been
given in the two years of drought.

The track out of the valley when we reached its head was execrable, and
the descent beyond into Wadi Marrakh almost dangerous; but the view
from the crest compensated us. Wadi Marrakh, a broad, peaceful avenue,
ran between two regular straight walls of hills to a circus four miles
off where valleys from left, right and front seemed to meet. Artificial
heaps of uncut stone were piled about the approach. As we entered it,
we saw that the grey hill-walls swept back on each side in a half-circle.
Before us, to the south, the curve was barred across by a straight
wall or step of blue-black lava, standing over a little grove of
thorn trees. We made for these and lay down in their thin shade,
grateful in such sultry air for any pretence of coolness.

The day, now at its zenith, was very hot; and my weakness had so
increased that my head hardly held up against it. The puffs of feverish
wind pressed like scorching hands against our faces, burning our eyes.
My pain made me breathe in gasps through the mouth; the wind cracked my
lips and seared my throat till I was too dry to talk, and drinking
became sore; yet I always needed to drink, as my thirst would not let
me lie still and get the peace I longed for. The flies were a plague.

The bed of the valley was of fine quartz gravel and white sand. Its
glitter thrust itself between our eyelids; and the level of the ground
seemed to dance as the wind moved the white tips of stubble grass to
and fro. The camels loved this grass, which grew in tufts, about
sixteen inches high, on slate-green stalks. They gulped down great
quantities of it until the men drove them in and couched them by me. At
the moment I hated the beasts, for too much food made their breath
stink; and they rumblingly belched up a new mouthful from their
stomachs each time they had chewed and swallowed the last, till a green
slaver flooded out between their loose lips over the side teeth, and
dripped down their sagging chins.

Lying angrily there, I threw a stone at the nearest, which got up and
wavered about behind my head: finally it straddled its back legs and
staled in wide, bitter jets; and I was so far gone with the heat and
weakness and pain that I just lay there and cried about it unhelping.
The men had gone to make a fire and cook a gazelle one of them had
fortunately shot; and I realized that on another day this halt would
have been pleasant to me; for the hills were very strange and their
colours vivid. The base had the warm grey of old stored sunlight; while
about their crests ran narrow veins of granite-coloured stone,
generally in pairs, following the contour of the skyline like the
rusted metals of an abandoned scenic railway. Arslan said the hills
were combed like cocks, a sharper observation.

After the men had fed we re-mounted, and easily climbed the first wave
of the lava flood. It was short, as was the second, on the top of which
lay a broad terrace with an alluvial plot of sand and gravel in its
midst. The lava was a nearly clean floor of iron-red rock-cinders, over
which were scattered fields of loose stone. The third and other steps
ascended to the south of us: but we turned east, up Wadi Gara.

Gara had, perhaps, been a granite valley down whose middle the lava had
flowed, slowly filling it, and arching itself up in a central heap. On
each side were deep troughs, between the lava and the hill-side. Rain
water flooded these as often as storms burst in the hills. The lava
flow, as it coagulated, had been twisted like a rope, cracked, and bent
back irregularly upon itself. The surface was loose with fragments
through which many generations of camel parties had worn an inadequate
and painful track.

We struggled along for hours, going slowly, our camels wincing at every
stride as the sharp edges slipped beneath their tender feet. The paths
were only to be seen by the droppings along them, and by the slightly
bluer surfaces of the rubbed stones. The Arabs declared them impassable
after dark, which was to be believed, for we risked laming our beasts
each time our impatience made us urge them on. Just before five in the
afternoon, however, the way got easier. We seemed to be near the head
of the valley, which grew narrow. Before us on the right, an exact
cone-crater, with tidy furrows scoring it from lip to foot, promised
good going; for it was made of black ash, clean as though sifted, with
here and there a bank of harder soil, and cinders. Beyond it was
another lava-field, older perhaps than the valleys, for its stones were
smoothed, and between them were straths of flat earth, rank with weeds.
In among these open spaces were Beduin tents, whose owners ran to us
when they saw us coming; and, taking our head-stalls with hospitable
force, led us in.

They proved to be Sheikh Fahad el Hansha and his men: old and garrulous
warriors who had marched with us to Wejh, and had been with Garland on
that great occasion when his first automatic mine had succeeded under a
troop train near Toweira station. Fahad would not hear of my resting
quietly outside his tent, but with the reckless equality of the desert
men urged me into an unfortunate place inside among his own vermin.
There he plied me with bowl after bowl of diuretic camel-milk between
questions about Europe, my home tribe, the English camel-pasturages,
the war in the Hejaz and the wars elsewhere, Egypt and Damascus, how
Feisal was, why did we seek Abdulla, and by what perversity did I
remain Christian, when their hearts and hands waited to welcome me to
the Faith?

So passed long hours till ten at night, when the guest-sheep was
carried in, dismembered royally over a huge pile of buttered rice. I
ate as manners demanded, twisted myself up in my cloak, and slept; my
bodily exhaustion, after those hours of the worst imaginable marching,
proofing me against the onslaught of lice and fleas. The illness,
however, had stimulated my ordinarily sluggish fancy, which ran riot
this night in dreams of wandering naked for a dark eternity over
interminable lava (like scrambled egg gone iron-blue, and very wrong),
sharp as insect-bites underfoot; and with some horror, perhaps a dead
Moor, always climbing after us.

In the morning we woke early and refreshed, with our clothes stinging-full
of fiery points feeding on us. After one more bowl of milk proffered
us by the eager Fahad, I was able to walk unaided to my camel and mount
her actively. We rode up the last piece of Wadi Gara to the crest,
among cones of black cinders from a crater to the south. Thence we
turned to a branch valley, ending in a steep and rocky chimney, up which
we pulled our camels.

Beyond we had an easy descent into Wadi Murrmiya, whose middle bristled
with lava like galvanized iron, on each side of which there were smooth
sandy beds, good going. After a while we came to a fault in the flow,
which served as a track to the other side. By it we crossed over,
finding the lava pocketed with soils apparently of extreme richness,
for in them were leafy trees and lawns of real grass, starred with
flowers, the best grazing of all our ride, looking the more wonderfully
green because of the blue-black twisted crusts of rock about. The lava
had changed its character. Here were no piles of loose stones, as big
as a skull or a man's hand, rubbed and rounded together; but bunched
and crystallized fronds of metallic rock, altogether impassable for
bare feet.

Another watershed conducted us to an open place where the Jeheina had
ploughed some eight acres of the thin soil below a thicket of scrub.
They said there were like it in the neighbourhood other fields, silent
witnesses to the courage and persistence of the Arabs.

It was called Wadi Chetl, and after it was another broken river of
lava, the worst yet encountered. A shadowy path zigzagged across it. We
lost one camel with a broken fore-leg, the result of a stumble in a
pot-hole; and the many bones which lay about showed that we were not
the only party to suffer misfortune in the passage. However, this ended
our lava, according to the guides, and we went thence forward along
easy valleys with finally a long run up a gentle slope till dusk. The
going was so good and the cool of the day so freshened me that we did
not halt at nightfall, after our habit, but pushed on for an hour
across the basin of Murrmiya into the basin of Wadi Ais, and there, by
Tleih, we stopped for our last camp in the open.

I rejoiced that we were so nearly in, for fever was heavy on me. I was
afraid that perhaps I was going to be really ill, and the prospect of
falling into the well-meaning hands of tribesmen in such a state was
not pleasant. Their treatment of every sickness was to burn holes in
the patient's body at some spot believed to be the complement of the
part affected. It was a cure tolerable to such as had faith in it, but
torture to the unbelieving: to incur it unwillingly would be silly, and
yet certain; for the Arabs' good intentions, selfish as their good
digestions, would never heed a sick man's protesting.

The morning was easy, over open valleys and gentle rides into Wadi Ais.
We arrived at Abu Markha, its nearest watering-place, just a few
minutes after Sherif Abdulla had dismounted there, and while he was
ordering his tents to be pitched in an acacia glade beyond the well. He
was leaving his old camp at Bir el Amri, lower down the valley, as he
had left Murabba, his camp before, because the ground had been fouled
by the careless multitude of his men and animals. I gave him the
documents from Feisal, explaining the situation in Medina, and the need
we had of haste to block the railway. I thought he took it coolly; but,
without argument, went on to say that I was a little tired after my
journey, and with his permission would lie down and sleep a while. He
pitched me a tent next his great marquee, and I went into it and rested
myself at last. It had been a struggle against faintness day-long in
the saddle to get here at all: and now the strain was ended with the
delivery of my message, I felt that another hour would have brought the
breaking point.




CHAPTER XXXIII



About ten days I lay in that tent, suffering a bodily weakness which
made my animal self crawl away and hide till the shame was passed. As
usual in such circumstances my mind cleared, my senses became more
acute, and I began at last to think consecutively of the Arab Revolt,
as an accustomed duty to rest upon against the pain. It should have
been thought out long before, but at my first landing in Hejaz there
had been a crying need for action, and we had done what seemed to
instinct best, not probing into the why, nor formulating what we really
wanted at the end of all. Instinct thus abused without a basis of past
knowledge and reflection had grown intuitive, feminine, and was now
bleaching my confidence; so in this forced inaction I looked for the
equation between my book-reading and my movements, and spent the
intervals of uneasy sleeps and dreams in plucking at the tangle of our
present.

As I have shown, I was unfortunately as much in command of the campaign
as I pleased, and was untrained. In military theory I was tolerably
read, my Oxford curiosity having taken me past Napoleon to Clausewitz
and his school, to Caemmerer and Moltke, and the recent Frenchmen. They
had all seemed to be one-sided; and after looking at Jomini and
Willisen, I had found broader principles in Saxe and Guibert and the
eighteenth century. However, Clausewitz was intellectually so much the
master of them, and his book so logical and fascinating, that
unconsciously I accepted his finality, until a comparison of Kuhne and
Foch disgusted me with soldiers, wearied me of their officious glory,
making me critical of all their light. In any case, my interest had
been abstract, concerned with the theory and philosophy of warfare
especially from the metaphysical side.

Now, in the field everything had been concrete, particularly the
tiresome problem of Medina; and to distract myself from that I began to
recall suitable maxims on the conduct of modern, scientific war. But
they would not fit, and it worried me. Hitherto, Medina had been an
obsession for us all; but now that I was ill, its image was not clear,
whether it was that we were near to it (one seldom liked the
attainable), or whether it was that my eyes were misty with too
constant staring at the butt. One afternoon I woke from a hot sleep,
running with sweat and pricking with flies, and wondered what on earth
was the good of Medina to us? Its harmfulness had been patent when we
were at Yenbo and the Turks in it were going to Mecca: but we had
changed all that by our march to Wejh. To-day we were blockading the
railway, and they only defending it. The garrison of Medina, reduced to
an inoffensive size, were sitting in trenches destroying their own
power of movement by eating the transport they could no longer feed. We
had taken away their power to harm us, and yet wanted to take away
their town. It was not a base for us like Wejh, nor a threat like Wadi
Ais. What on earth did we want it for?

The camp was bestirring itself after the torpor of the midday hours;
and noises from the world outside began to filter in to me past the
yellow lining of the tent-canvas, whose every hole and tear was stabbed
through by a long dagger of sunlight. I heard the stamping and snorting
of the horses plagued with flies where they stood in the shadow of the
trees, the complaint of camels, the ringing of coffee mortars, distant
shots. To their burden I began to drum out the aim in war. The books
gave it pat--the destruction of the armed forces of the enemy by the one
process-battle. Victory could he purchased only by blood. This was a
hard saying for us. As the Arabs had no organized forces, a Turkish
Foch would have no aim? The Arabs would not endure casualties. How
would our Clausewitz buy his victory? Von der Goltz had seemed to go
deeper, saying it was necessary not to annihilate the enemy, but to
break his courage. Only we showed no prospect of ever breaking
anybody's courage.

However, Goltz was a humbug, and these wise men must be talking
metaphors; for we were indubitably winning our war; and as I pondered
slowly, it dawned on me that we had won the Hejaz war. Out of every
thousand square miles of Hejaz nine hundred and ninety-nine were now
free. Did my provoked jape at Vickery, that rebellion was more like
peace than like war, hold as much truth as haste? Perhaps in war the
absolute did rule, but for peace a majority was good enough. If we held
the rest, the Turks were welcome to the tiny fraction on which they
stood, till peace or Doomsday showed them the futility of clinging to
our window-pane.

I brushed off the same flies once more from my face patiently, content
to know that the Hejaz War was won and finished with: won from the day
we took Wejh, if we had had wit to see it. Then I broke the thread of
my argument again to listen. The distant shots had grown and tied
themselves into long, ragged volleys. They ceased. I strained my ears
for the other sounds which I knew would follow. Sure enough across the
silence came a rustle like the dragging of a skirt over the flints,
around the thin walls of my tent. A pause, while the camel-riders drew
up: and then the soggy tapping of canes on the thick of the beasts'
necks to make them kneel.

They knelt without noise: and I timed it in my memory: first the
hesitation, as the camels, looking down, felt the soil with one foot
for a soft place; then the muffled thud and the sudden loosening of
breath as they dropped on their fore-legs, since this party had come
far and were tired; then the shuffle as the hind legs were folded in,
and the rocking as they tossed from side to side thrusting outward with
their knees to bury them in the cooler subsoil below the burning
flints, while the riders, with a quick soft patter of bare feet, like
birds over the ground, were led off tacitly either to the coffee hearth
or to Abdulla's tent, according to their business. The camels would
rest there, uneasily switching their tails across the shingle till
their masters were free and looked to their stabling.

I had made a comfortable beginning of doctrine, but was left still to
find an alternative end and means of war. Ours seemed unlike the ritual
of which Foch was priest; and I recalled him, to see a difference in
land between HIM and us. In his modern war--absolute war he called
it--two nations professing incompatible philosophies put them to the test
of force. Philosophically, it was idiotic, for while opinions were
arguable, convictons needed shooting to be cured; and the struggle
could end only when the supporters of the one immaterial principle had
no more means of resistance against the supporters of the other. It
sounded like a twentieth-century restatement of the wars of religion,
whose logical end was utter destruction of one creed, and whose
protagonists believed that God's judgement would prevail. This might do
for France and Germany, but would not represent the British attitude.
Our Army was not intelligently maintaining a philosophic conception in
Flanders or on the Canal. Efforts to make our men hate the enemy
usually made them hate the fighting. Indeed Foch had knocked out his
own argument by saying that such war depended on levy in mass, and was
impossible with professional armies; while the old army was still the
British ideal, and its manner the ambition of our ranks and our files.
To me the Foch war seemed only an exterminative variety, no more
absolute than another. One could as explicably call it 'murder war'.
Clausewitz enumerated all sorts of war . . . personal wars, joint-proxy
duels, for dynastic reasons . . . expulsive wars, in party
politics . . . commercial wars, for trade objects . . . two wars seemed
seldom alike. Often the parties did not know their aim, and blundered till
the march of events took control. Victory in general habit leaned to the
clear-sighted, though fortune and superior intelligence could make a
sad muddle of nature's 'inexorable' law.

I wondered why Feisal wanted to fight the Turks, and why the Arabs
helped him, and saw that their aim was geographical, to extrude the
Turk from all Arabic-speaking lands in Asia. Their peace ideal of
liberty could exercise itself only so. In pursuit of the ideal
conditions we might kill Turks, because we disliked them very much; but
the killing was a pure luxury. If they would go quietly the war would
end. If not, we would urge them, or try to drive them out. In the last
resort, we should be compelled to the desperate course of blood and the
maxims of 'murder war', but as cheaply as could be for ourselves, since
the Arabs fought for freedom, and that was a pleasure to be tasted only
by a man alive. Posterity was a chilly thing to work for, no matter how
much a man happened to love his own, or other people's already-produced
children.

At this point a slave slapped my tent-door, and asked if the Emir might
call. So I struggled into more clothes, and crawled over to his great
tent to sound the depth of motive in him. It was a comfortable place,
luxuriously shaded and carpeted deep in strident rugs, the aniline-dyed
spoils of Hussein Mabeirig's house in Rabegh. Abdulla passed most of
his day in it, laughing with his friends, and playing games with
Mohammed Hassan, the court jester. I set the ball of conversation
rolling between him and Shakir and the chance sheikhs, among whom was
the fire-hearted Ferhan el Aida, the son of Doughty's Motlog; and I was
rewarded, for Abdulla's words were definite. He contrasted his hearers'
present independence with their past servitude to Turkey, and roundly
said that talk of Turkish heresy, or the immoral doctrine of YENI-TURAN,
or the illegitimate Caliphate was beside the point. It was Arab
country, and the Turks were in it: that was the one issue. My argument
preened itself.

The next day a great complication of boils developed out, to conceal my
lessened fever, and to chain me down yet longer in impotence upon my
face in this stinking tent. When it grew too hot for dreamless dozing,
I picked up my tangle again, and went on ravelling it out, considering
now the whole house of war in its structural aspect, which was
strategy, in its arrangements, which were tactics, and in the sentiment
of its inhabitants, which was psychology; for my personal duty was
command, and the commander, like the master architect, was responsible
for all.

The first confusion was the false antithesis between strategy, the aim
in war, the synoptic regard seeing each part relative to the whole, and
tactics, the means towards a strategic end, the particular steps of its
staircase. They seemed only points of view from which to ponder the
elements of war, the Algebraical element of things, a Biological
element of lives, and the Psychological element of ideas.

The algebraical element looked to me a pure science, subject to
mathematical law, inhuman. It dealt with known variables, fixed
conditions, space and time, inorganic things like hills and climates
and railways, with mankind in type-masses too great for individual
variety, with all artificial aids and the extensions given our
faculties by mechanical invention. It was essentially formulable.

Here was a pompous, professorial beginning. My wits, hostile to the
abstract, took refuge in Arabia again. Translated into Arabic, the
algebraic factor would first take practical account of the area we
wished to deliver, and I began idly to calculate how many square miles:
sixty: eighty: one hundred: perhaps one hundred and forty thousand
square miles. And how would the Turks defend all that? No doubt by a
trench line across the bottom, if we came like an army with banners;
but suppose we were (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a thing
intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a
gas? Armies were like plants, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through
long stems to the head. We might be a vapour, blowing where we listed.
Our kingdoms lay in each man's mind; and as we wanted nothing material
to live on, so we might offer nothing material to the killing. It
seemed a regular soldier might be helpless without a target, owning
only what he sat on, and subjugating only what, by order, he could poke
his rifle at.

Then I figured out how many men they would need to sit on all this
ground, to save it from our attack-in-depth, sedition putting up her
head in every unoccupied one of those hundred thousand square miles. I
knew the Turkish Army exactly, and even allowing for their recent
extension of faculty by aeroplanes and guns and armoured trains (which
made the earth a smaller battlefield) still it seemed they would have
need of a fortified post every four square miles, and a post could not
be less than twenty men. If so, they would need six hundred thousand
men to meet the ill-wills of all the Arab peoples, combined with the
active hostility of a few zealots.

How many zealots could we have? At present we had nearly fifty
thousand: sufficient for the day. It seemed the assets in this element
of war were ours. If we realized our raw materials and were apt with
them, then climate, railway, desert, and technical weapons could also
be attached to our interests. The Turks were stupid; the Germans behind
them dogmatical. They would believe that rebellion was absolute like
war, and deal with it on the analogy of war. Analogy in human things
was fudge, anyhow; and war upon rebellion was messy and slow, like
eating soup with a knife.

This was enough of the concrete; so I sheered off [GREEK], the
mathematical element, and plunged into the nature of the biological
factor in command. Its crisis seemed to be the breaking point, life and
death, or less finally, wear and tear. The war-philosophers had
properly made an art of it, and had elevated one item, 'effusion of
blood', to the height of an essential, which became humanity in battle,
an act touching every side of our corporal being, and very warm. A line
of variability, Man, persisted like leaven through its estimates,
making them irregular. The components were sensitive and illogical, and
generals guarded themselves by the device of a reserve, the significant
medium of their art. Goltz had said that if you knew the enemy's
strength, and he was fully deployed, then you could dispense with a
reserve: but this was never. The possibility of accident, of some flaw
in materials was always in the general's mind, and the reserve
unconsciously held to meet it.

The 'felt' element in troops, not expressible in figures, had to be
guessed at by the equivalent of Plato's (greek?), and the greatest
commander of men was he whose intuitions most nearly happened. Nine-tenths
of tactics were certain enough to be teachable in schools; but
the irrational tenth was like the kingfisher flashing across the pool,
and in it lay the test of generals. It could be ensued only by instinct
(sharpened by thought practising the stroke) until at the crisis it
came naturally, a reflex. There had been men whose [GREEK] so nearly
approached perfection that by its road they reached the certainty of
[GREEK]. The Greeks might have called such genius for command [GREEK];
had they bothered to rationalize revolt.

My mind seesawed back to apply this to ourselves, and at once knew that
it was not bounded by mankind, that it applied also to materials. In
Turkey things were scarce and precious, men less esteemed than
equipment. Our cue was to destroy, not the Turk's army, but his
minerals. The death of a Turkish bridge or rail, machine or gun or
charge of high explosive, was more profitable to us than the death of a
Turk. In the Arab Army at the moment we were chary both of materials
and of men. Governments saw men only in mass; but our men, being
irregulars, were not formations, but individuals. An individual death,
like a pebble dropped in water, might make but a brief hole; yet rings
of sorrow widened out therefrom. We could not afford casualties.

Materials were easier to replace. It was our obvious policy to be
superior in some one tangible branch; gun-cotton or machine-guns or
whatever could be made decisive. Orthodoxy had laid down the maxim,
applied to men, of being superior at the critical point and moment of
attack. We might be superior in equipment in one dominant moment or
respect; and for both things and men we might give the doctrine a
twisted negative side, for cheapness' sake, and be weaker than the
enemy everywhere except in that one point or matter. The decision of
what was critical would always be ours. Most wars were wars of contact,
both forces striving into touch to avoid tactical surprise. Ours should
be a war of detachment. We were to contain the enemy by the silent
threat of a vast unknown desert, not disclosing ourselves till we
attacked. The attack might be nominal, directed not against him, but
against his stuff; so it would not seek either his strength or his
weakness, but his most accessible material. In railway-cutting it would
be usually an empty stretch of rail; and the more empty, the greater
the tactical success. We might turn our average into a rule (not a law,
since war was antinomian) and develop a habit of never engaging the
enemy. This would chime with the numerical plea for never affording a
target. Many Turks on our front had no chance all the war to fire on
us, and we were never on the defensive except by accident and in error.

The corollary of such a rule was perfect 'intelligence', so that we
could plan in certainty. The chief agent must be the general's head;
and his understanding must be faultless, leaving no room for chance.
Morale, if built on knowledge, was broken by ignorance. When we knew
all about the enemy we should be comfortable. We must take more pains
in the service of news than any regular staff.

I was getting through my subject. The algebraical factor had been
translated into terms of Arabia, and fitted like a glove. It promised
victory. The biological factor had dictated to us a development of the
tactical line most in accord with the genius of our tribesmen. There
remained the psychological element to build up into an apt shape. I
went to Xenophon and stole, to name it, his word DIATHETICS, which had
been the art of Cyrus before he struck.

Of this our 'propaganda' was the stained and ignoble offspring. It was
the pathic, almost the ethical, in war. Some of it concerned the crowd,
an adjustment of its spirit to the point where it became useful to
exploit in action, and the pre-direction of this changing spirit to a
certain end. Some of it concerned the individual, and then it became a
rare art of human kindness, transcending, by purposed emotion, the
gradual logical sequence of the mind. It was more subtle than tactics,
and better worth doing, because it dealt with uncontrollables, with
subjects incapable of direct command. It considered the capacity for
mood of our men, their complexities and mutability, and the cultivation
of whatever in them promised to profit our intention. We had to arrange
their minds in order of battle just as carefully and as formally as
other officers would arrange their bodies. And not only our own men's
minds, though naturally they came first. We must also arrange the minds
of the enemy, so far as we could reach them; then those other minds of
the nation supporting us behind the firing line, since more than half
the battle passed there in the back; then the minds of the enemy nation
waiting the verdict; and of the neutrals looking on; circle beyond
circle.

There were many humiliating material limits, but no moral
impossibilities; so that the scope of our diathetical activities was
unbounded. On it we should mainly depend for the means of victory on
the Arab front: and the novelty of it was our advantage. The printing
press, and each newly-discovered method of communication favoured the
intellectual above the physical, civilization paying the mind always
from the body's funds. We kindergarten soldiers were beginning our art
of war in the atmosphere of the twentieth century, receiving our
weapons without prejudice. To the regular officer, with the tradition
of forty generations of service behind him, the antique arms were the
most honoured. As we had seldom to concern ourselves with what our men
did, but always with what they thought, the diathetic for us would be
more than half the command. In Europe it was set a little aside, and
entrusted to men outside the General Staff. In Asia the regular
elements were so weak that irregulars could not let the metaphysical
weapon rust unused.

Battles in Arabia were a mistake, since we profited in them only by the
ammunition the enemy fired off. Napoleon had said it was rare to find
generals willing to fight battles; but the curse of this war was that
so few would do anything else. Saxe had told us that irrational battles
were the refuges of fools: rather they seemed to me impositions on the
side which believed itself weaker, hazards made unavoidable either by
lack of land room or by the need to defend a material property dearer
than the lives of soldiers. We had nothing material to lose, so our
best line was to defend nothing and to shoot nothing. Our cards were
speed and time, not hitting power. The invention of bully beef had
profited us more than the invention of gunpowder, but gave us
strategical rather than tactical strength, since in Arabia range was
more than force, space greater than the power of armies.

I had now been eight days lying in this remote tent, keeping my ideas
general, till my brain, sick of unsupported thinking, had to be dragged
to its work by an effort of will, and went off into a doze whenever
that effort was relaxed. The fever passed: my dysentery ceased; and
with restored strength the present again became actual to me. Facts
concrete and pertinent thrust themselves into my reveries; and my
inconstant wit bore aside towards all these roads of escape. So I
hurried into line my shadowy principles, to have them once precise
before my power to evoke them faded.

It seemed to me proven that our rebellion had an unassailable base,
guarded not only from attack, but from the fear of attack. It had a
sophisticated alien enemy, disposed as an army of occupation in an area
greater than could be dominated effectively from fortified posts. It
had a friendly population, of which some two in the hundred were
active, and the rest quietly sympathetic to the point of not betraying
the movements of the minority. The active rebels had the virtues of
secrecy and self-control, and the qualities of speed, endurance and
independence of arteries of supply. They had technical equipment enough
to paralyse the enemy's communications. A province would be won when we
had taught the civilians in it to die for our ideal of freedom. The
presence of the enemy was secondary. Final victory seemed certain, if
the war lasted long enough for us to work it out.




CHAPTER XXXIV



Obviously I was well again, and I remembered the reason of my journey
to Wadi Ais. The Turks meant to march out of Medina, and Sir Archibald
Murray wanted us to attack them in professional form. It was irksome
that he should come butting into our show from Egypt, asking from us
alien activities. Yet the British were the bigger; and the Arabs lived
only by grace of their shadow. We were yoked to Sir Archibald Murray,
and must work with him, to the point of sacrificing our non-essential
interests for his, if they would not be reconciled. At the same time we
could not possibly act alike. Feisal might be a free gas: Sir
Archibald's army, probably the most cumbrous in the world, had to be
laboriously pushed forward on its belly. It was ridiculous to suppose
it could keep pace with ethical conceptions as nimble as the Arab
Movement: doubtful even if it would understand them. However, perhaps
by hindering the railway we could frighten the Turks off their plan to
evacuate Medina, and give them reason to remain in the town on the
defensive: a conclusion highly serviceable to both Arabs and English,
though possibly neither would see it, yet.

Accordingly, I wandered into Abdulla's tent, announcing my complete
recovery and an ambition to do something to the Hejaz railway. Here
were men, guns, machine-guns, explosives and automatic mines: enough
for a main effort. But Abdulla was apathetic. He wanted to talk about
the Royal families of Europe, or the Battle of the Somme: the slow
march of his own war bored him. However, Sherif Shakir, his cousin and
second in command, was fired to enthusiasm, and secured us licence to
do our worst. Shakir loved the Ateiba, and swore they were the best
tribe on earth; so we settled to take mostly Ateiba with us. Then we
thought we might have a mountain gun, one of the Egyptian Army Krupp
veterans, which had been sent by Feisal to Abdulla from Wejh as a
present.

Shakir promised to collect the force, and we agreed that I should go in
front (gently, as befitted my weakness) and search for a target. The
nearest and biggest was Aba el Naam Station. With me went Raho,
Algerian officer in the French Army, and member of Bremond's mission, a
very hard-working and honest fellow. Our guide was Mohammed el Kadhi,
whose old father, Dakhil-Allah, hereditary lawman of the Juheina, had
guided the Turks down to Yenbo last December. Mohammed was eighteen,
solid and silent natured. Sherif Fauzan el Harith, the famous warrior
who had captured Eshref at Janbila, escorted us, with about twenty
Ateiba and five or six Juheina adventurers.

We left on March the twenty-sixth, while Sir Archibald Murray was
attacking Gaza; and rode down Wadi Ais; but after three hours the heat
proved too much for me, and we stopped by a great sidr tree (lote or
jujube, but the fruit was scarce) and rested under it the midday hours.
Sidr trees cast heavy shade: there was a cool east wind, and few flies.
Wadi Ais was luxuriant with thorn trees and grass, and its air full of
white butterflies and scents of wild flowers; so that we did not
remount till late in the afternoon, and then did only a short march,
leaving Wadi Ais by the right, after passing in an angle of the valley
a ruined terrace and cistern. Once there had been villages in this
part, with the underground waters carefully employed in their frequent
gardens; but now it was waste.

The following morning we had two hours' rough riding around the spurs
of Jebel Serd into Wadi Turaa, a historic valley, linked by an easy
pass to Wadi Yenbo. We spent this midday also under a tree, near some
Juheina tents, where Mohammed guested while we slept. Then we rode on
rather crookedly for two more hours, and camped after dark. By ill luck
an early spring scorpion stung me severely on the left hand while I lay
down to sleep. The place swelled up; and my arm became stiff and sore.

At five next morning, after a long night, we restarted, and passed
through the last hills, out into the Jurf, an undulating open space
which ran up southward to Jebel Antar, a crater with a split and
castellated top, making it a landmark. We turned half-right in the
plain, to get under cover of the low hills which screened it from Wadi
Hamdh, in whose bed the railway lay. Behind these hills we rode
southward till opposite Aba el Naam. There we halted to camp, close to
the enemy but quite in safety. The hill-top commanded them; and we
climbed it before sunset for a first view of the station.

The hill was, perhaps, six hundred feet high and steep, and I made many
stages of it, resting on my way up: but the sight from the top was
good. The railway was some three miles off. The station had a pair of
large, two-storied houses of basalt, a circular watertower, and other
buildings. There were bell-tents, huts and trenches, but no sign of
guns. We could see about three hundred men in all.

We had heard that the Turks patrolled their neighbourhood actively at
night. A bad habit this: so we sent off two men to lie by each
blockhouse, and fire a few shots after dark. The enemy, thinking it a
prelude to attack, stood-to in their trenches all night, while we were
comfortably sleeping; but the cold woke us early with a restless dawn
wind blowing across the Jurf, and singing in the great trees round our
camp. As we climbed to our observation point the sun conquered the
clouds and an hour later it grew very hot.

We lay like lizards in the long grass round the stones of the foremost
cairn upon the hill-top, and saw the garrison parade. Three hundred and
ninety-nine infantry, little toy men, ran about when the bugle sounded,
and formed up in stiff lines below the black building till there was
more bugling: then they scattered, and after a few minutes the smoke of
cooking fires went up. A herd of sheep and goats in charge of a little
ragged boy issued out towards us. Before he reached the foot of the
hills there came a loud whistling down the valley from the north, and a
tiny, picture-book train rolled slowly into view across the hollow
sounding bridge and halted just outside the station, panting out white
puffs of steam.

The shepherd lad held on steadily, driving his goats with shrill cries
up our hill for the better pasture on the western side. We sent two
Juheina down behind a ridge beyond sight of the enemy, and they ran
from each side and caught him. The lad was of the outcast Heteym,
pariahs of the desert, whose poor children were commonly sent on hire
as shepherds to the tribes about them. This one cried continually, and
made efforts to escape as often as he saw his goats straying uncared-for
about the hill. In the end the men lost patience and tied him up
roughly, when he screamed for terror that they would kill him. Fauzan
had great ado to make him quiet, and then questioned him about his
Turkish masters. But all his thoughts were for the flock: his eyes
followed them miserably while the tears made edged and crooked tracks
down his dirty face.

Shepherds were a class apart. For the ordinary Arab the hearth was a
university, about which their world passed and where they heard the
best talk, the news of their tribe, its poems, histories, love tales,
lawsuits and bargainings. By such constant sharing in the hearth
councils they grew up masters of expression, dialecticians, orators,
able to sit with dignity in any gathering and never at a loss for
moving words. The shepherds missed the whole of this. From infancy they
followed their calling, which took them in all seasons and weathers,
day and night, into the hills and condemned them to loneliness and
brute company. In the wilderness, among the dry bones of nature, they
grew up natural, knowing nothing of man and his affairs; hardly sane in
ordinary talk; but very wise in plants, wild animals, and the habits of
their own goats and sheep, whose milk was their chief sustenance. With
manhood they became sullen, while a few turned dangerously savage, more
animal than man, haunting the flocks, and finding the satisfaction of
their adult appetites in them, to the exclusion of more licit
affections.

For hours after the shepherd had been suppressed only the sun moved in
our view. As it climbed we shifted our cloaks to filter its harshness,
and basked in luxurious warmth. The restful hill-top gave me back
something of the sense-interests which I had lost since I had been ill
I was able to note once more the typical hill scenery, with its hard
stone crests, its sides of bare rock, and lower slopes of loose sliding
screens, packed, as the base was approached, solidly with a thin dry
soil. The stone itself was glistening, yellow, sunburned stuff;
metallic in ring, and brittle; splitting red or green or brown as the
case might be. From every soft place sprouted thorn-bushes; and there
was frequent grass, usually growing from one root in a dozen stout
blades, knee-high and straw-coloured: the heads were empty ears between
many-feathered arrows of silvery down. With these, and with a shorter
grass, whose bottle-brush heads of pearly grey reached only to the
ankle, the hill-sides were furred white and bowed themselves lowly
towards us with each puff of the casual wind.

Verdure it was not, but excellent pasturage; and in the valleys were
bigger tufts of grass, coarse, waist-high and bright green when fresh
though they soon faded to the burned yellow of ordinary Me. They grew
thickly in all the beds of water-ribbed sand and shingle, between the
occasional thorn trees, some of which stood forty feet in height. The
sidr trees, with their dry, sugary fruit, were rare. But bushes of
browned tamarisk, tall broom, other varieties of coarse grass, some
flowers, and everything which had thorns, flourished about our camp,
and made it a rich sample of the vegetation of the Hejaz highlands.
Only one of the plants profited ourselves, and that was the hemeid: a
sorrel with fleshy heart-shaped leaves, whose pleasant acidity stayed
our thirst.

At dusk we climbed down again with the goat-herd prisoner, and what we
could gather of his flock. Our main body would come this night; so that
Fauzan and I wandered out across the darkling plain till we found a
pleasant gun-position in some low ridges not two thousand yards from
the station. On our return, very tired, fires were burning among the
trees. Shakir had just arrived, and his men and ours were roasting
goat-flesh contentedly. The shepherd was tied up behind my sleeping
place, because he had gone frantic when his charges were unlawfully
slaughtered. He refused to taste the supper; and we only forced bread
and rice into him by the threat of dire punishment if he insulted our
hospitality. They tried to convince him that we should take the station
next day and kill his masters; but he would not be comforted, and
afterwards, for fear lest he escape, had to be lashed to his tree
again.

After supper Shakir told me that he had brought only three hundred men
instead of the agreed eight or nine hundred. However, it was his war,
and therefore his tune, so we hastily modified the plans. We would not
take the station; we would frighten it by a frontal artillery attack,
while we mined the railway to the north and south, in the hope of
trapping that halted train. Accordingly we chose a party of
Garland-trained dynamiters who should blow up something north of the
bridge at dawn, to seal that direction; while I went off with high
explosive and a machine-gun with its crew to lay a mine to the south of
the station, the probable direction from which the Turks would seek or
send help, in their emergency.

Mohammed el Khadi guided us to a deserted bit of line just before
midnight. I dismounted and fingered its thrilling rails for the first
time during the war. Then, in an hour's busy work, we laid the mine,
which was a trigger action to fire into twenty pounds of blasting
gelatine when the weight of the locomotive overhead deflected the
metals. Afterwards we posted the machine-gunners in a little
bush-screened watercourse, four hundred yards from and fully commanding
the spot where we hoped the train would be derailed. They were to hide
there; while we went on to cut the telegraph, that isolation might
persuade Aba el Naam to send their train for reinforcements, as our
main attack developed.

So we rode another half-hour, and then turned in to the line, and again
were fortunate to strike an unoccupied place. Unhappily the four
remaining Juheina proved unable to climb a telegraph pole, and I had to
struggle up it myself. It was all I could do, after my illness; and
when the third wire was cut the flimsy pole shook so that I lost grip,
and came slipping down the sixteen feet upon the stout shoulders of
Mohammed, who ran in to break my fall, and nearly got broken himself.
We took a few minutes to breathe, but afterwards were able to regain
our camels. Eventually we arrived in camp just as the others had
saddled up to go forward.

Our mine-laying had taken four hours longer than we had planned and the
delay put us in the dilemma either of getting no rest, or of letting
the main body march without us. Finally by Shakir's will we let them
go, and fell down under our trees for an hour's sleep, without which I
felt I should collapse utterly. The time was just before daybreak, an
hour when the uneasiness of the air affected trees and animals, and
made even men-sleepers turn over sighingly. Mohammed, who wanted to see
the fight, awoke. To get me up he came over and cried the morning
prayer-call in my ear, the raucous voice sounding battle, murder, and
sudden death across my dreams. I sat up and rubbed the sand out of
red-rimmed aching eyes, as we disputed vehemently of prayer and sleep. He
pleaded that there was not a battle every day, and showed the cuts and
bruises sustained during the night in helping me. By my blackness and
blueness I could feel for him, and we rode off to catch the army, after
loosing the still unhappy shepherd boy, with advice to wait for our
return.

A band of trodden untidiness in a sweep of gleaming water-rounded sand
showed us the way, and we arrived just as the guns opened fire. They
did excellently, and crashed in all the top of one building, damaged
the second, hit the pump-room, and holed the water-tank. One lucky
shell caught the front waggon of the train in the siding, and it took
fire furiously. This alarmed the locomotive, which uncoupled and went
off southward. We watched her hungrily as she approached our mine, and
when she was on it there came a soft cloud of dust and a report and she
stood still. The damage was to the front part, as she was reversed and
the charge had exploded late; but, while the drivers got out, and
jacked up the front wheels and tinkered at them, we waited and waited
in vain for the machine-gun to open fire. Later we learned that the
gunners, afraid of their loneliness, had packed up and marched to join
us when we began shooting. Half an hour after, the repaired engine went
away towards Jebel Antar, going at a foot pace and clanking loudly; but
going none the less.

Our Arabs worked in towards the station, under cover of the
bombardment, while we gnashed our teeth at the machine-gunners. Smoke
clouds from the fire trucks screened the Arab advance which wiped out
one enemy outpost, and captured another. The Turks withdrew their
surviving detachments to the main position, and waited rigorously in
their trenches for the assault, which they were in no better spirit to
repel than we were to deliver. With our advantages in ground the place
would have been a gift to us, if only we had had some of Feisal's men
to charge home.

Meanwhile the wood, tents and trucks in the station were burning, and
the smoke was too thick for us to shoot, so we broke off the action. We
had taken thirty prisoners, a mare, two camels and some more sheep; and
had killed and wounded seventy of the garrison, at a cost to ourselves
of one man slightly hurt. Traffic was held up for three days of repair
and investigation. So we did not wholly fail.




CHAPTER XXXV



We left two parties in the neighbourhood to damage the line on the next
day and the next, while we rode to Abdullah's camp on April the first.
Shakir, splendid in habit, held a grand parade on entry, and had
thousands of joy-shots fired in honour of his partial victory. The
easy-going camp made carnival.

In the evening I went wandering in the thorn-grove behind the tents,
till I began to see through the thick branches a wild light, from
bursts of raw flame; and across the flame and smoke came the rhythm of
drums, in tune with hand-clapping, and the deep roar of a tribal
chorus. I crept up quietly, and saw an immense fire, ringed by hundreds
of Ataiba sitting on the ground one by the other, gazing intently on
Shakir, who, upright and alone in their midst, performed the dance of
their song. He had put off his cloak, and wore only his white head-veil
and white robes: the powerful firelight was reflected by these and by
his pale, ravaged face. As he sang he threw back his head, and at the
close of each phrase raised his hands, to let the full sleeves run back
upon his shoulders, while he waved his bare arms weirdly. The tribe
around him beat time with their hands, or bayed out the refrains at his
nod. The grove of trees where I stood outside the circle of light was
thronged with Arabs of stranger tribes, whispering, and watching the
Atban.

In the morning we determined on another visit to the line, for fuller
trial of the automatic mine-action which had half-failed at Aba el
Naam. Old Dakhil-Allah said that he would come with me himself on this
trip; the project of looting a train had tempted him. With us went some
forty of the Juheina, who seemed to me stouter men than the high-bred
Ateiba. However, one of the chiefs of the Ataiba, Sultan el Abbud, a
boon friend of Abdulla and Shakir, refused to be left behind. This
good-tempered but hare-brained fellow, sheikh of a poor section of the
tribe, had had more horses killed under him in battle than any other
Ateibi warrior. He was about twenty-six and a great rider; full of
quips and fond of practical jokes, very noisy: tall and strong, with a
big, square head, wrinkled forehead, and deep-set bright eyes. A young
moustache and beard hid his ruthless jaw and the wide, straight mouth,
with white teeth gleaming and locked like a wolfs.

We took a machine-gun and its soldier-crew of thirteen with us, to
settle our train when caught. Shakir, with his grave courtesy to the
Emir's guest, set us on our road for the first half-hour. This time we
kept to the Wadi Ais almost to its junction with Hamdh, finding it very
green and full of grazing, since it had flooded twice already in this
winter. At last we bore off to the right over a ditch on to a flat, and
there slept in the sand, rather distressed by a shower of rain which
sent little rills over the ground about midnight: but the next morning
was bright and hot, and we rode into the huge plain where the three
great valleys, Tubja, Ais and Jizil, flowed into and became one with
Hamdh. The course of the main stream was overgrown by asla wood, just
as at Abu Zereibat, with the same leprous bed of hummocky sand-blisters:
but the thicket was only two hundred yards broad, and beyond it
the plain with its grained intricacy of shallow torrent-beds
stretched for yet further miles. At noon we halted by a place like a
wilderness garden, waist deep in juicy grass and flowers, upon which
our happy camels gorged themselves for an hour and then sat down, full
and astonished.

The day seemed to be hotter and hotter: the sun drew close, and
scorched us without intervening air. The clean, sandy soil was so baked
that my bare feet could not endure it, and I had to walk in sandals, to
the amusement of the Juheina, whose thick soles were proof even against
slow fire. As the afternoon passed on the light became dim, but the
heat steadily increased with an oppression and sultriness which took me
by surprise. I kept turning my head to see if some mass was not just
behind me, shutting off the air.

There had been long rolls of thunder all morning in the hills, and the
two peaks, Serd and Jasim, were wrapped in folds of dark blue and
yellow vapour, which looked motionless and substantial. At last I saw
that part of the yellow cloud off Serd was coming slowly against the
wind in our direction, raising scores of dust devils before its feet.

The cloud was nearly as high as the hill. While it approached, two
dust-spouts, tight and symmetrical chimneys, advanced, one on the right
and one on the left of its front. Dakhil-Allah responsibly looked ahead
and to each side for shelter, but saw none. He warned me that the storm
would be heavy.

When it got near, the wind, which had been scorching our faces with its
hot breathlessness, changed suddenly; and, after waiting a moment, blew
bitter cold and damp upon our backs. It also increased greatly in
violence, and at the same time the sun disappeared, blotted out by
thick rags of yellow air over our heads. We stood in a horrible light,
ochreous and fitful. The brown wall of cloud from the hills was now
very near, rushing changelessly upon us with a loud grinding sound.
Three minutes later it struck, wrapping about us a blanket of dust and
stinging grains of sand, twisting and turning in violent eddies, and
yet advancing eastward at the speed of a strong gale.

We had put our camels' backs to the storm, to march before it: but
these internal whirling winds tore our tightly-held cloaks from our
hands, filled our eyes, and robbed us of all sense of direction by
turning our camels right or left from their course. Sometimes they were
blown completely round: once we clashed helplessly together in a
vortex, while large bushes, tufts of grass, and even a small tree were
torn up by the roots in dense waves of the soil about them, and driven
against us, or blown over our heads with dangerous force. We were never
blinded--it was always possible to see for seven or eight feet to each
side--but it was risky to look out, as, in addition to the certain
sand-blast, we never knew if we should not meet a flying tree, a rush of
pebbles, or a spout of grass-laden dust.

This storm lasted for eighteen minutes, and then leaped forward from us
as suddenly as it had come. Our party was scattered over a square mile
or more, and before we could rally, while we, our clothes and our
camels were yet smothered in dust, yellow and heavy with it from head
to foot, down burst torrents of thick rain and muddied us to the skin.
The valley began to run in plashes of water, and Dakhil-Allah urged us
across it quickly. The wind chopped once more, this time to the north,
and the rain came driving before it in harsh sheets of spray. It beat
through our woollen cloaks in a moment, and moulded them and our shirts
to our bodies, and chilled us to the bone.

We reached the hill-barrier in mid-afternoon, but found the valley bare
and shelterless, colder than ever. After riding up it for three or four
miles we halted, and climbed a great crag to see the railway which,
they said, lay just beyond. On the height the wind was so terrible that
we could not cling to the wet slippery rocks against the slapping and
bellying of our cloaks and skirts. I took mine off, and climbed the
rest of the way half-naked, more easily, and hardly colder than before.
But the effort proved useless, the air being too thick for observation.
So I worked down, cut and bruised, to the others; and dressed numbly.
On our way back we suffered the only casualty of this trip. Sultan had
insisted on coming with us, and his Ateibi servant, who must follow him
though he had no head for heights, slipped in one bad place with a fall
of forty feet to the stones, and plunged down headlong.

When we got back my hands and feet were too broken to serve me longer,
and I lay down and shivered for an hour or so while the others buried
the dead man in a side valley. On their return they met suddenly an
unknown rider on a camel, crossing their track. He fired at them. They
fired back, snap-shooting through the rain, and the evening swallowed
him. This was disquieting, for surprise was our main ally, and we could
only hope that he would not return to warn the Turks that there were
raiders in the neighbourhood.

After the heavy camels with the explosives caught us, we mounted again
to get closer to the line; but we had no more than started when
brazenly down the visible wind in the misted valley came the food-call
of Turkish bugles. Dakhil-Allah thrust his ear forward in the direction
of the sound, and understood that over there lay Madahrij, the small
station below which we meant to operate. So we steered on the hateful
noise, hateful because it spoke of supper and of tents, whereas we were
shelterless, and on such a night could not hope to make ourselves a
fire and bake bread from the flour and water in our saddle-bags, and
consequently must go hungry.

We did not reach the railway till after ten o'clock at night, in
conditions of invisibility which made it futile to choose a machine-gun
position. At random I pitched upon kilometre 1,121 from Damascus for
the mine. It was a complicated mine, with a central trigger to fire
simultaneous charges thirty yards apart: and we hoped in this way to
get the locomotive whether it was going north or south. Burying the
mine took four hours, for the rain had caked the surface and rotted it.
Our feet made huge tracks on the flat and on the bank, as though a
school of elephants had been dancing there. To hide these marks was out
of the question, so we did the other thing, trampling about for
hundreds of yards, even bringing up our camels to help, until it looked
as though half an army had crossed the valley, and the mine-place was
no better and no worse than the rest. Then we went back a safe
distance, behind some miserable mounds, and cowered down in the open,
waiting for day. The cold was intense. Our teeth chattered, and we
trembled and hissed involuntarily, while our hands drew in like claws.

At dawn the clouds had disappeared, and a red sun promised, over the
very fine broken hills beyond the railway. Old Dakhil-Allah, our active
guide and leader in the night, now took general charge, and sent us out
singly and in pairs to all the approaches of our hiding-place. He
himself crawled up the ridge before us to watch events upon the railway
through his glasses. I was praying that there might be no events till
the sun had gained power and warmed me, for the shivering fit still
jerked me about. However, soon the sun was up and unveiled, and things
improved. My clothes were drying. By noon it was nearly as hot as the
day before, and we were gasping for shade, and thicker clothes, against
the sun.

First of all, though, at six in the morning, Dakhil-Allah reported a
trolley, which came from the south, and passed over the mine
harmlessly--to our satisfaction, for we had not laid a beautiful
compound charge for just four men and a sergeant. Then sixty men
sallied out from Madahrij. This disturbed us till we saw that they were
to replace five telegraph poles blown down by the storm of the
afternoon before. Then at seven-thirty a patrol of eleven men went down
the line: two inspecting each rail minutely, three marching each side
of the bank looking for cross-tracks, and one, presumably the N.C.O.,
walking grandly along the metals with nothing to do.

However, to-day, they did find something, when they crossed our
footprints about kilometre 1,121. They concentrated there upon the
permanent way, stared at it, stamped, wandered up and down, scratched
the ballast; and thought exhaustively. The time of their search passed
slowly for us: but the mine was well hidden, so that eventually they
wandered on contentedly towards the south, where they met the Hedia
patrol, and both parties sat together in the cool shade of a bridge-arch,
and rested after their labours. Meanwhile the train, a heavy train,
came along from the south. Nine of its laden trucks held women and
children from Medina, civil refugees being deported to Syria, with
their household stuff. It ran over the charges without explosion. As
artist I was furious; as commander deeply relieved: women and children
were not proper spoil.

The Juheina raced to the crest where Dakhil-Allah and myself lay
hidden, when they heard the train coming, to see it blown in pieces.
Our stone headwork had been built for two, so that the hilltop, a bald
cone conspicuously opposite the working party, became suddenly and
visibly populous. This was too much for the nerves of the Turks, who
fled back into Madahrij, and thence, at about five thousand yards,
opened a brisk rifle fire. They must also have telephoned to Hedia,
which soon came to Me: but since the nearest outpost on that side was
about six miles off, its garrisons held their fire, and contented
themselves with selections on the bugle, played all day. The distance
made it grave and beautiful.

Even the rifle shooting did us no harm; but the disclosure of ourselves
was unfortunate. At Madahrij were two hundred men, and at Hedia eleven
hundred, and our retreat was by the plain of Hamdh on which Hedia
stood. Their mounted troops might sally out and cut our rear. The
Juheina had good camels, and so were safe; but the machine-gun was a
captured German sledge-Maxim: a heavy load for its tiny mule. The
servers were on foot, or on other mules: their top speed would be only
six miles an hour, and their fighting value, with a single gun, not
high. So after a council of war we rode back with them half-way through
the hills, and there dismissed them, with fifteen Juheina, towards Wadi
Ais.

This made us mobile, and Dakhil-Allah, Sultan, Mohammed and I rode back
with the rest of our party for another look at the line. The sunlight
was now terrific, with faint gusts of scorching heat blowing up at us
out of the south. We took refuge about ten o'clock under some spacious
trees, where we baked bread and lunched, in nice view of the line, and
shaded from the worst of the sun. About us, over the gravel, circles of
pale shadow from the crisping leaves ran to and fro, like grey,
indeterminate bugs, as the slender branches dipped reluctantly in the
wind. Our picnic annoyed the Turks, who shot or trumpeted at us
incessantly through the middle day and till evening, while we slept in
turn.

About five they grew quiet, and we mounted and rode slowly across the
open valley towards the railway. Madahrij revived in a paroxysm of
fire, and all the trumpets of Hedia blared again. The monkey-pleasure
of pulling large and impressive legs was upon us. So when we reached
the line we made our camels kneel down beside it, and, led by
Dakhil-Allah as Imam, performed a sunset prayer quietly between the rails.
It was probably the first prayer of the Juheina for a year or so, and I
was a novice, but from a distance we passed muster, and the Turks
stopped shooting in bewilderment This was the first and last time I
ever prayed in Arabia as a Moslem.

After the prayer it was still much too light to hide our actions: so we
sat round on the embankment smoking, till dusk, when I tried to go off
by myself and dig up the mine, to learn, for service on the next
occasion, why it had failed. However, the Juheina were as interested in
that as I. Along they came in a swarm and clustered over the metals
during the search. They brought my heart into my throat, for it took me
an hour to find just where the mine was hidden. Laying a Garland mine
was shaky work, but scrabbling in pitch darkness up and down a hundred
yards of railway, feeling for a hair-trigger buried in the ballast,
seemed, at the time, an almost uninsurable occupation. The two charges
connected with it were so powerful that they would have rooted out
seventy yards of track; and I saw visions of suddenly blowing up, not
only myself, but my whole force, every moment. To be sure, such a feat
would have properly completed the bewilderment of the Turks!

At last I found it, and ascertained by touch that the lock had sunk
one-sixteenth of an inch, due to bad setting by myself or because the
ground had subsided after the rain. I firmed it into its place. Then,
to explain ourselves plausibly to the enemy, we began blowing up things
to the north of the mine. We found a little four-arch bridge and put it
into the air. Afterwards we turned to rails and cut about two hundred:
and while the men were laying and lighting charges I taught Mohammed to
climb a splintery pole; together we cut the wires, and with their
purchase dragged down other poles. All was done at speed, for we feared
lest Turks come after us: and when our explosive work was finished we
ran back like hares to our camels, mounted them, and trotted without
interruption down the windy valley once more to the plain of Hamdh.

There we were in safety, but old Dakhil-Allah was too pleased with the
mess we had made of the line to go soberly. When we were on the sandy
flat he beat up his camel into a canter, and we pounded madly after him
through the colourless moonlight. The going was perfect, and we never
drew rein for three hours, till we over-rode our machine-gun and its
escort camping on the road home. The soldiers heard our rout yelling
through the night, thought us enemies of sorts, and let fly at us with
their Maxim: but it jammed after half a belt, and they, being tailors
from Mecca, were unhandy with it. So no one was hurt, and we captured
them mirthfully.

In the morning we slept lazily long, and breakfasted at Rubiaan, the
first well in Wadi Ais. Afterwards we were smoking and talking, about
to bring in the camels, when suddenly we felt the distant shock of a
great explosion behind us on the railway. We wondered if the mine had
been discovered or had done its duty. Two scouts had been left to
report, and we rode slowly; for them, and because the rain two days ago
had brought down Wadi Ais once more in flood, and its bed was all
flecked over with shallow pools of soft, grey water, between banks of
silvery mud, which the current had rippled into fish-scales. The warmth
of the sun made the surface like fine glue, on which our helpless
camels sprawled comically, or went down with a force and completeness
surprising in such dignified beasts. Their tempers were roughened each
time by our fit of mirth.

The sunlight, the easy march and the expectation of the scouts' news
made everything gay, and we developed social virtues: but our limbs,
stiff from the exertions of yesterday, and our abundant food,
determined us to fall short of Abu Markha for the night. So, near
sunset, we chose a dry terrace in the valley to sleep upon. I rode up
it first and turned and looked at the men reined in below me in a
group, upon their bay camels like copper statues in the fierce light of
the setting sun; they seemed to be burning with an inward flame.

Before bread was baked the scouts arrived, to tell us that at dawn the
Turks had been busy round our damages; and a little later a locomotive
with trucks of rails, and a crowded labour gang on top, had come up
from Hedia, and had exploded the mine fore and aft of its wheels. This
was everything we had hoped, and we rode back to Abdullah's camp on a
morning of perfect springtime, in a singing company. We had proved that
a well-laid mine would fire; and that a well-laid mine was difficult
even for its maker to discover. These points were of importance; for
Newcombe, Garland and Hornby were now out upon the railway, harrying
it: and mines were the best weapon yet discovered to make the regular
working of their trains costly and uncertain for our Turkish enemy.




CHAPTER XXXVI



Despite his kindness and charm, I could not like Abdullah or his camp:
perhaps because I was not sociable, and these people had no personal
solitude: perhaps because their good humour showed me the futility of
my more than Palomides' pains, not merely to seem better than myself,
but to make others better. Whereas nothing was futile in the atmosphere
of higher thinking and responsibility which ruled at Feisal's. Abdulla
passed his merry day in the big cool tent accessible only to friends,
limiting suppliants or new adherents or the hearing of disputes to one
public session in the afternoon. For the rest he read the papers, ate
carefully, slept. Especially he played games, either chess with his
staff or practical jokes with Mohammed Hassan. Mohammed, nominally
Muedhdhin, was really court fool. A tiresome old fool I found him, as
my illness left me less even than usual in jesting mood.

Abdullah and his friends, Shakir, Fauzan, and the two sons of Hamza
among the Sherifs, with Sultan el Abbud and Hoshan, from the Ateiba,
and ibn Mesfer, the guest-master, would spend much of the day and all
the evening hours tormenting Mohammed Hassan. They stabbed him with
thorns, stoned him, dropped sun-heated pebbles down his back, set him
on fire. Sometimes the jest would be elaborate, as when they laid a
powder trail under the rugs, and lured Mohammed Hassan to sit on its
end. Once Abdullah shot a coffee-pot off his head thrice from twenty
yards, and then rewarded his long-suffering servility with three
months' pay.

Abdullah would sometimes ride a little, or shoot a little, and return
exhausted to his tent for massage; and afterwards reciters would be
introduced to soothe his aching head. He was fond of Arabic verses and
exceptionally well read. The local poets found him a profitable
audience. He was also interested in history and letters, and would have
grammatical disputations in his tent and adjudge money prizes.

He affected to have no care for the Hejaz situation, regarding the
autonomy of the Arabs as assured by the promises of Great Britain to
his father, and leaning at ease against this prop. I longed to tell him
that the half-witted old man had obtained from us no concrete or
unqualified undertaking of any sort, and that their ship might founder
on the bar of his political stupidity; but that would have been to give
away my English masters, and the mental tug of war between honesty and
loyalty, after swaying a while, settled again expediently into
deadlock.

Abdulla professed great interest in the war in Europe, and studied it
closely in the Press. He was also acquainted with Western politics, and
had learned by rote the courts and ministries of Europe, even to the
name of the Swiss President. I remarked again how much the comfortable
circumstance that we still had a King made for the reputation of
England in this world of Asia. Ancient and artificial societies like
this of the Sherifs and feudal chieftains of Arabia found a sense of
honourable security when dealing with us in such proof that the highest
place in our state was not a prize for merit or ambition.

Time slowly depressed my first, favourable, opinion of Abdulla's
character. His constant ailments, which once aroused compassion, became
fitter for contempt when their causes were apparent in laziness and
self-indulgence, and when he was seen to cherish them as occupations of
his too-great leisure. His casual attractive fits of arbitrariness now
seemed feeble tyranny disguised as whims; his friendliness became
caprice; his good humour love of pleasure. The leaven of insincerity
worked through all the fibres of his being. Even his simplicity
appeared false upon experience; and inherited religious prejudice was
allowed rule over the keenness of his mind because it was less trouble
to him than uncharted thought. His brain often betrayed its intricate
pattern, disclosing idea twisted tightly over idea into a strong cord
of design; and thus his indolence marred his scheming, too. The webs
were constantly unravelling through his carelessness in leaving them
unfinished. Yet they never separated into straight desires, or grew
into effective desires. Always he watched out of the corner of his
bland and open eye our returns to his innocent-sounding questions,
reading an insect-subtlety of significant meaning into every hesitation
or uncertainty or honest mistake.

One day I entered to find him sitting upright and wide-eyed with a spot
of red in either cheek. Sergeant Frost, his old tutor, had just come
from Colonel Bremond, innocent bearer of a letter which pointed out how
the British were wrapping up the Arabs on all sides--at Aden, at Gaza,
at Bagdad--and hoped that Abdulla realized his situation. He asked hotly
what I thought of it. In answer, I fell back on artifice, and replied
in a pretty phrase that I hoped he would suspect our honesty when he
found us backbiting our allies in private letters. The delicately
poisoned Arabic pleased him, and he paid us the edged compliment of
saying that he knew we were sincere, since otherwise we would not be
represented at Jeddah by Colonel Wilson. There, characteristically, his
subtlety hanged itself, not perceiving the double subtlety which
negatived him. He did not understand that honesty might be the best-paying
cat's paw of rogues, and Wilson, too, downright readily or quickly to
suspect evil in the dignitaries above him.

Wilson never told even a half-truth. If instructed to inform the King
diplomatically that the subsidy of the month could not at present be
increased, he would ring up Mecca and say, 'Lord, Lord, there is no
more money'. As for lying, he was not merely incapable of it, but also
shrewd enough to know that it was the worst gambit against players
whose whole life had passed in a mist of deceits, and whose perceptions
were of the finest. The Arab leaders showed a completeness of instinct,
a reliance upon intuition, the unperceived foreknown, which left our
centrifugal minds gasping. Like women, they understood and judged
quickly, effortlessly, unreasonably. It almost seemed as though the
Oriental exclusion of woman from politics had conferred her particular
gifts upon the men. Some of the speed and secrecy of our victory, and
its regularity, might perhaps be ascribed to this double endowment's
offsetting and emphasizing the rare feature that from end to end of it
there was nothing female in the Arab movement, but the camels.

The outstanding figure of Abdulla's entourage was Sherif Shakir, a man
of twenty-nine, and companion since boyhood of the four Emirs. His
mother was Circassian, as had been his grandmother. From them he
obtained his fair complexion; but the flesh of his face was torn away
by smallpox. From its white ruin two restless eyes looked out, very
bright and big; for the faintness of his eyelashes and eyebrows made
his stare directly disconcerting. His figure was tall, slim, almost
boyish from the continual athletic activity of the man. His sharp,
decided, but pleasant voice frayed out if he shouted. His manner while
delightfully frank, was abrupt, indeed imperious; with a humour as
cracked as his cackling laugh.

This bursting freedom of speech seemed to respect nothing on earth
except King Hussein: towards himself he exacted deference, more so than
did Abdulla, who was always playing tricks with his companions, the
bevy of silk-clad fellows who came about him when he would be easy.
Shakir joined wildly in the sport, but would smartingly punish a
liberty. He dressed simply, but very cleanly, and, like Abdulla, spent
public hours with toothpick and toothstick. He took no interest in
books and never wearied his head with meditation, but was intelligent
and interesting in talk. He was devout, but hated Mecca, and played
backgammon while Abdulla read the Koran. Yet by fits he would pray
interminably.

In war he was the man at arms. His feats made him the darling of the
tribes. He, in return, described himself as a Bedawi, and an Ateibi,
and imitated them. He wore his black hair in plaits down each side of
his face, and kept it glossy with butter, and strong by frequent
washings in camel urine. He encouraged nits, in deference to the Beduin
proverb that a deserted head showed an ungenerous mind: and wore the
BRIM, a plaited girdle of thin leathern thongs wrapped three or four
times round the loins to confine and support the belly. He owned
splendid horses and camels: was considered the finest rider in Arabia:
ready for a match with anyone.

Shakir gave me the sense that he preferred a fit of energy to sustained
effort: but there was balance and shrewdness behind his mad manner.
Sherif Hussein had used him on embassies to Cairo before the war, to
arrange private business with the Khedive of Egypt. The Beduin figure
must have looked strange in the stucco splendour of the Abdin. Abdulla
had unlimited admiration for Shakir and tried to see the world with his
eyes of gay carelessness. Between them they seriously complicated my
mission to Wadi Ais.




CHAPTER XXXVII



Of the tactical situation, Abdulla made very little, pretending
pettishly that it was Feisal's business. He had come to Wadi Ais to
please his younger brother, and there he would stay. He would not go on
raids himself, and hardly encouraged those who did. I detected jealousy
of Feisal in this, as if he wished ostentatiously to neglect military
operations to prevent unbecoming comparison with his brother's
performance. Had Shakir not helped me in the first instance, I might
have had delay and difficulty in getting started, though Abdulla would
have ceded in time and graciously permitted anything not calling
directly upon his own energies. However, there were now two parties on
the railway, with reliefs enough to do a demolition of some sort every
day or so. Much less interference than this would suffice to wreck the
working of trains, and by making the maintenance of the Turkish
garrison at Medina just a shade less difficult than its evacuation
would serve the interests of British and Arab alike. So I judged my
work in Wadi Ais sufficiently done, and well done.

I longed to get north again quit of this relaxing camp. Abdulla might
let me do all I wanted, but would do nothing of his own: whereas for me
the best value of the revolt lay in the things which the Arabs
attempted without our aid. Feisal was the working enthusiast with the
one idea of making his ancient race justify its renown by winning
freedom with its own hands. His lieutenants Nasir or Sharraf or Ali ibn
el Hussein seconded his plans with head and heart, so that my part
became only synthetic. I combined their loose showers of sparks into a
firm flame: transformed their series of unrelated incidents into a
conscious operation.

We left on the morning of April the tenth, after pleasant farewells
from Abdulla. My three Ageyl were again with me; and Arslan, the little
Syrian Punch-figure, very conscious of Arab dress, and of the droll
outlook and manners of all Bedouins. He rode disgracefully and endured
sorrow the whole way at the uneasy steps of his camels: but he salved
his self-respect by pointing out that in Damascus no decent man would
ride a camel, and his humour by showing that in Arabia no one but a
Damascene would ride so bad a camel as his. Mohammed el Kadhi was our
guide, with six Juheina.

We marched up Wadi Tleih as we had come, but branched off to the right,
avoiding the lava. We had brought no food, so stopped at some tents for
hospitality of their rice and millet. This springtime in the hills was
the time of plenty for the Arabs, whose tents were full of sheep-milk
and goat-milk and camel-milk, with everyone well fed and well looking.
Afterwards we rode, in weather like a summer's day in England, for five
hours down a narrow, flood-swept valley, Wadi Osman, which turned and
twisted in the hills hut gave an easy road. The last part of the march
was after dark, and when we stopped, Arslan was missing. We fired
volleys and lit fires hoping he would come upon us; but till dawn there
was no sign, and the Juheina ran back and forward in doubting search.
However, he was only a mile behind, fast asleep under a tree.

A short hour later we stopped at the tents of a wife of Dakhil-Allah,
for a meal. Mohammed allowed himself a bath, a fresh braiding of his
luxuriant hair, and clean clothes. They took very long about the food,
and it was not till near noon that at last it came: a great bowl of
saffron-rice, with a broken lamb littered over it. Mohammed, who felt
it his duty in my honour to be dainty in service, arrested the main
dish, and took from it the fill of a small copper basin for him and me.
Then he waved the rest of the camp on to the large supply. Mohammed's
mother knew herself old enough to be curious about me. She questioned
me about the women of the tribe of Christians and their way of life,
marvelling at my white skin, and the horrible blue eyes which looked,
she said, like the sky shining through the eye-sockets of an empty
skull.

Wadi Osman to-day was less irregular in course, and broadened slowly.
After two hours and a half it twisted suddenly to the right through a
gap, and we found ourselves in Hamdh, in a narrow, cliff-walled gorge.
As usual, the edges of the bed of hard sand were bare; and the middle
bristled with hamdla-asla trees, in grey, salty, bulging scabs. Before
us were flood-pools of sweet water, the largest of them nearly three
hundred feet long, and sharply deep. Its narrow bed was cut into the
light impervious clay. Mohammed said its water would remain till the
year's end, but would soon turn salt and useless.

After drinks we bathed in it, and found it full of little silver fish
like sardines: all ravenous. We loitered after bathing, prolonging our
bodily pleasure; and remounting in the dark, rode for six miles, till
sleepy. Then we turned away to higher ground for the night's camp. Wadi
Hamdh differed from the other wild valleys of Hejaz, in its chill air.
This was, of course, most obvious at night, when a white mist, glazing
the valley with a salt sweat, lifted itself some feet up and stood over
it motionless. But even by day, and in sunshine the Hamdh felt damp and
raw and unnatural.

Next morning we started early and passed large pools in the valley; but
only a few were fit to drink: the rest had gone green and brackish with
the little white fish floating, dead and pickled, in them. Afterwards
we crossed the bed, and struck northward over the plain of Ugila, where
Ross, our flight commander from Wejh, had lately made an aerodrome.
Arab guards were sitting by his petrol, and we breakfasted from them,
and afterwards went along Wadi Methar to a shady tree, where we slept
four hours.

In the afternoon everyone was fresh, and the Juheina began to match
their camels against one another. At first it was two and two, but the
others joined, till they were six abreast. The road was bad, and
finally, one lad cantered his animal into a heap of stones. She
slipped, so that he crashed off and broke an arm. It was a misfortune:
but Mohammed coolly tied him up with rags and camel-girths, and left
him at ease under a tree to rest a little before riding back to Ugila
for the night. The Arabs were casual about broken bones. In a tent at
Wadi Ais I had seen a youth whose forearm had set crookedly; realizing
this, he had dug into himself with a dagger till he had bared the bone,
re-broken it, and set it straight; and there he lay, philosophically
enduring the flies, with his left forearm huge under healing mosses and
clay, waiting for it to be well.

In the morning we pushed on to Khauthila, a well, where we watered the
camels. The water was impure and purged them. We rode again in the
evening for another eight miles, intending to race straight through to
Wejh in a long last day. So we got up soon after midnight, and before
daylight were coming down the long slope from Raal into the plain,
which extended across the mouths of Hamdh into the sea. The ground was
scarred with motor tracks, exciting a lively ambition in the Juheina to
hurry on and see the new wonders of Feisal's army. Fired by this, we
did a straight march of eight hours, unusually long for these Hejaz
Bedouin.

We were then reasonably tired, both men and camels, since we had had no
food after breakfast the day before. Therefore it seemed fit to the boy
Mohammed to run races. He jumped from his camel, took off his clothes,
and challenged us to race to the clump of thorns up the slope in front,
for a pound English. Everybody took the offer, and the camels set off
in a mob. The distance, about three-quarters of a mile, uphill, over
heavy sand, proved probably more than Mohammed had bargained for.
However, he showed surprising strength and won, though by inches: then
he promptly collapsed, bleeding from mouth and nose. Some of our camels
were good, and they went their fastest when pitted against one another.

The air here was very hot and heavy for natives of the hills, and I
feared there might be consequences of Mohammed's exhaustion: but after
we had rested an hour and made him a cup of coffee he got going again
and did the six remaining hours into Wejh as cheerfully as ever;
continuing to play the little pranks which had brightened our long
march from Abu Markha. If one man rode quietly behind another's camel,
poked his stick suddenly up its rump, and screeched, it mistook him for
an excited male, and plunged off at a mad gallop, very disconcerting to
the rider. A second good game was to cannon one galloping camel with
another, and crash it into a near tree. Either the tree went down
(valley trees in the light Hejaz soil were notably unstable things) or
the rider was scratched and torn; or, best of all, he was swept quite
out of his saddle, and left impaled on a thorny branch, if not dropped
violently to the ground. This counted as a bull, and was very popular
with everyone but him.

The Bedu were odd people. For an Englishman, sojourning with them was
unsatisfactory unless he had patience wide and deep as the sea. They
were absolute slaves of their appetite, with no stamina of mind,
drunkards for coffee, milk or water, gluttons for stewed meat,
shameless beggars of tobacco. They dreamed for weeks before and after
their rare sexual exercises, and spent the intervening days titillating
themselves and their hearers with bawdy tales. Had the circumstances of
their lives given them opportunity they would have been sheer
sensualists. Their strength was the strength of men geographically
beyond temptation: the poverty of Arabia made them simple, continent,
enduring. If forced into civilized life they would have succumbed like
any savage race to its diseases, meanness, luxury, cruelty, crooked
dealing, artifice; and, like savages, they would have suffered them
exaggeratedly for lack of inoculation.

If they suspected that we wanted to drive them either they were mulish
or they went away. If we comprehended them, and gave time and trouble
to make things tempting to them, then they would go to great pains for
our pleasure. Whether the results achieved were worth the effort, no
man could tell. Englishmen, accustomed to greater returns, would not,
and, indeed, could not, have spent the time, thought and tact lavished
every day by sheikhs and emirs for such meagre ends. Arab processes
were clear, Arab minds moved logically as our own, with nothing
radically incomprehensible or different, except the premiss: there was
no excuse or reason, except our laziness and ignorance, whereby we
could call them inscrutable or Oriental, or leave them misunderstood.

They would follow us, if we endured with them, and played the game
according to their rules. The pity was, that we often began to do so,
and broke down with exasperation and threw them over, blaming them for
what was a fault in our own selves. Such strictures like a general's
complaint of bad troops, were in reality a confession of our faulty
foresight, often made falsely out of mock modesty to show that, though
mistaken, we had at least the wit to know our fault.




CHAPTER XXXVIII



Cleanliness made me stop outside Wejh and change my filthy clothes.
Feisal, when I reported, led me into the inner tent to talk. It seemed
that everything was well. More cars had arrived from Egypt: Yenbo was
emptied of its last soldiers and stores: and Sharraf himself had come
up, with an unexpected unit, a new machine-gun company of amusing
origin. We had left thirty sick and wounded men in Yenbo when we
marched away; also heaps of broken weapons, with two British
armourer-sergeants repairing them. The sergeants, who found time hang
heavily, had taken mended maxims and patients and combined them into a
machine-gun company so thoroughly trained by dumb show that they were as
good as the best we had.

Rabegh also was being abandoned. The aeroplanes from it had flown up
here and were established. Their Egyptian troops had been shipped after
them, with Joyce and Goslett and the Rabegh staff, who were now in
charge of things at Wejh. Newcombe and Hornby were up country tearing
at the railway day and night, almost with their own hands for lack of
helpers. The tribal propaganda was marching forward: all was for the
best, and I was about to take my leave when Suleiman, the guest-master,
hurried in and whispered to Feisal, who turned to me with shining eyes,
trying to be calm, and said, 'Auda is here'. I shouted, 'Auda abu
Tayi', and at that moment the tent-flap was drawn back, before a deep
voice which boomed salutations to Our Lord, the Commander of the
Faithful. There entered a tall, strong figure, with a haggard face,
passionate and tragic. This was Auda, and after him followed Mohammed,
his son, a child in looks, and only eleven years old in truth.

Feisal had sprung to his feet. Auda caught his hand and kissed it, and
they drew aside a pace or two and looked at each other--a splendidly
unlike pair, typical of much that was best in Arabia, Feisal the
prophet, and Auda the warrior, each filling his part to perfection, and
immediately understanding and liking the other. They sat down. Feisal
introduced us one by one, and Auda with a measured word seemed to
register each person.

We had heard much of Auda, and were banking to open Akaba with his
help; and after a moment I knew, from the force and directness of the
man, that we would attain our end. He had come down to us like a
knight-errant, chafing at our delay in Wejh, anxious only to be
acquiring merit for Arab freedom in his own lands. If his performance
was one-half his desire, we should be prosperous and fortunate. The
weight was off all minds before we went to supper.

We were a cheerful party; Nasib, Faiz, Mohammed el Dheilan Auda's
politic cousin, Zaal his nephew, and Sherif Nasir, resting in Wejh for
a few days between expeditions. I told Feisal odd stories of Abdulla's
camp, and the joy of breaking railways. Suddenly Auda scrambled to his
feet with a loud 'God forbid', and flung from the tent. We stared at
one another, and there came a noise of hammering outside. I went after
to learn what it meant, and there was Auda bent over a rock pounding
his false teeth to fragments with a stone. 'I had forgotten,' he
explained, 'Jemal Pasha gave me these. I was eating my Lord's bread
with Turkish teeth!' Unfortunately he had few teeth of his own, so that
henceforward eating the meat he loved was difficulty and after-pain,
and he went about half-nourished till we had taken Akaba, and Sir
Reginald Wingate sent him a dentist from Egypt to make an Allied set.

Auda was very simply dressed, northern fashion, in white cotton with a
red Mosul head-cloth. He might be over fifty, and his black hair was
streaked with white; but he was still strong and straight, loosely
built, spare, and as active as a much younger man. His face was
magnificent in its lines and hollows. On it was written how truly the
death in battle of Annad, his favourite son, cast sorrow over all his
life when it ended his dream of handing on to future generations the
greatness of the name of Abu Tayi. He had large eloquent eyes, like
black velvet in richness. His forehead was low and broad, his nose very
high and sharp, powerfully hooked: his mouth rather large and mobile:
his beard and moustaches had been trimmed to a point in Howeitat style,
with the lower jaw shaven underneath.

Centuries ago the Howeitat came from Hejaz, and their nomad clans
prided themselves on being true Bedu. Auda was their master type. His
hospitality was sweeping; except to very hungry souls, inconvenient.
His generosity kept him always poor, despite the profits of a hundred
raids. He had married twenty-eight times, had been wounded thirteen
times; whilst the battles he provoked had seen all his tribesmen hurt
and most of his relations killed. He himself had slain seventy-five
men, Arabs, with his own hand in battle: and never a man except in
battle. Of the number of dead Turks he could give no account: they did
not enter the register. His Toweiha under him had become the first
fighters of the desert, with a tradition of desperate courage, a sense
of superiority which never left them while there was Me and work to do:
but which had reduced them from twelve hundred men to less than five
hundred, in thirty years, as the standard of nomadic fighting rose.

Auda raided as often as he had opportunity, and as widely as he could.
He had seen Aleppo, Basra, Wejh, and Wadi Dawasir on his expeditions:
and was careful to be at enmity with nearly all tribes in the desert,
that he might have proper scope for raids. After his robber-fashion, he
was as hard-headed as he was hot-headed, and in his maddest exploits
there would be a cold factor of possibility to lead him through. His
patience in action was extreme: and he received and ignored advice,
criticism, or abuse, with a smile as constant as it was very charming.
If he got angry his face worked uncontrollably, and he burst into a fit
of shaking passion, only to be assuaged after he had killed: at such
times he was a wild beast, and men escaped his presence. Nothing on
earth would make him change his mind or obey an order to do the least
thing he disapproved; and he took no heed of men's feelings when his
face was set.

He saw life as a saga. All the events in it were significant: all
personages in contact with him heroic. His mind was stored with poems
of old raids and epic tales of fights, and he overflowed with them on
the nearest listener. If he lacked listeners he would very likely sing
them to himself in his tremendous voice, deep and resonant and loud. He
had no control over his lips, and was therefore terrible to his own
interests and hurt his friends continually. He spoke of himself in the
third person, and was so sure of his fame that he loved to shout out
stories against himself. At times he seemed taken by a demon of
mischief, and in public assembly would invent and utter on oath
appalling tales of the private life of his hosts or guests: and yet
with all this he was modest, as simple as a child, direct, honest,
kind-hearted, and warmly loved even by those to whom he was most
embarrassing--his friends.

Joyce lived near the beach, beside the spread lines of the Egyptian
troops, in an imposing array of large tents and small tents, and we
talked over things done or to do. Every effort was still directed
against the railway. Newcombe and Garland were near Muadhdham with
Sherif Sharraf and Maulud. They had many Billi, the mule-mounted
infantry, and guns and machine-guns, and hoped to take the fort and
railway station there. Newcombe meant then to move ahl Feisal's men
forward very close to Medain Salih, and, by taking and holding a part
of the line, to cut off Medina and compel its early surrender. Wilson
was coming up to help in this operation, and Davenport would take as
many of the Egyptian army as he could transport, to reinforce the Arab
attack.

All this programme was what I had believed necessary for the further
progress of the Arab Revolt when we took Wejh. I had planned and
arranged some of it myself. But now, since that happy fever and
dysentery in Abdulla's camp had given me leisure to meditate upon the
strategy and tactics of irregular war, it seemed that not merely the
details but the essence of this plan were wrong. It therefore became my
business to explain my changed ideas, and if possible to persuade my
chiefs to follow me into the new theory.

So I began with three propositions. Firstly, that irregulars would not
attack places, and so remained incapable of forcing a decision.
Secondly, that they were as unable to defend a line or point as they
were to attack it. Thirdly, that their virtue lay in depth, not in
face.

The Arab war was geographical, and the Turkish Army an accident. Our
aim was to seek the enemy's weakest material link and bear only on that
till time made their whole length fail. Our largest resources, the
Beduin on whom our war must be built, were unused to formal operations,
but had assets of mobility, toughness, self-assurance, knowledge of the
country, intelligent courage. With them dispersal was strength.
Consequently we must extend our front to its maximum, to impose on the
Turks the longest possible passive defence, since that was, materially,
their most costly form of war.

Our duty was to attain our end with the greatest economy of life, since
life was more precious to us than money or time. If we were patient and
superhuman-skilled, we could follow the direction of Saxe and reach
victory without battle, by pressing our advantages mathematical and
psychological. Fortunately our physical weakness was not such as to
demand this. We were richer than the Turks in transport, machine-guns,
cars, high explosive. We could develop a highly mobile, highly equipped
striking force of the smallest size, and use it successively at
distributed points of the Turkish line, to make them strengthen their
posts beyond the defensive minimum of twenty men. This would be a short
cut to success.

We must not take Medina. The Turk was harmless there. In prison in
Egypt he would cost us food and guards. We wanted him to stay at
Medina, and every other distant place, in the largest numbers. Our
ideal was to keep his railway just working, but only just, with the
maximum of loss and discomfort. The factor of food would confine him to
the railways, but he was welcome to the Hejaz Railway, and the
Trans-Jordan railway, and the Palestine and Syrian railways for the
duration of the war, so long as he gave us the other nine hundred and
ninety-nine thousandths of the Arab world. If he tended to evacuate too
soon, as a step to concentrating in the small area which his numbers could
dominate effectually, then we should have to restore his confidence by
reducing our enterprises against him. His stupidity would be our ally,
for he would like to hold, or to think he held, as much of his old
provinces as possible. This pride in his imperial heritage would keep
him in his present absurd position--all flanks and no front.

In detail I criticized the ruling scheme. To hold a middle point of the
railway would be expensive for the holding force might be threatened from
each side. The mixture of Egyptian troops with tribesmen was a moral
weakness. If there were professional soldiers present, the Beduin would
stand aside and watch them work, glad to be excused the leading part.
Jealousy, superadded to inefficiency, would be the outcome. Further,
the Billi country was very dry, and the maintenance of a large force up by
the line technically difficult.

Neither my general reasoning, however, nor my particular objections had
much weight. The plans were made, and the preparations advanced. Everyone
was too busy with his own work to give me specific authority to launch out
on mine. All I gained was a hearing, and a qualified admission that my
counter-offensive might be a useful diversion. I was working out with Auda
abu Tayi a march to the Howeitat in their spring pastures of the Syrian
desert. From them we might raise a mobile camel force, and rush Akaba from
the eastward without guns or machine-guns.

The eastern was the unguarded side, the line of least resistance, the
easiest for us. Our march would be an extreme example of a turning
movement, since it involved a desert journey of six hundred miles to
capture a trench within gunfire of our ships: but there was no practicable
alternative, and it was so entirely in the spirit of my sick-bed
ruminations that its issue might well be fortunate, and would surely be
instructive. Auda thought all things possible with dynamite and money,
and that the smaller clans about Akaba would join us. Feisal, who was
already in touch with them, also believed that they would help if we won a
preliminary success up by Maan and then moved in force against the port.
The Navy raided it while we were thinking, and their captured Turks gave
us such useful information that I became eager to go off at once.

The desert route to Akaba was so long and so difficult that we could take
neither guns nor machine-guns, nor stores nor regular soldiers.
Accordingly the element I would withdraw from the railway scheme was
only my single self; and, in the circumstances, this amount was
negligible, since I felt so strongly against it that my help there would
have been half-hearted. So I decided to go my own way, with or without
orders. I wrote a letter full of apologies to Clayton, telling him that
my intentions were of the best: and went.





BOOK FOUR. Extending to Akaba




CHAPTERS XXXIX TO LIV



THE PORT OF AKABA WAS NATURALLY SO STRONG THAT IT COULD BE TAKEN ONLY
BY SURPRISE FROM INLAND: BUT THE OPPORTUNE ADHERENCE TO FEISAL OF AUDA
ABU TAYI MADE US HOPE TO ENROL ENOUGH TRIBESMEN IN THE EASTERN DESERT
FOR SUCH A DESCENT UPON THE COAST.

NASIR, AUDA, AND I SET OFF TOGETHER ON THE LONG RIDE. HITHERTO FEISAL
HAD BEEN THE PUBLIC LEADER: BUT HIS REMAINING IN WEJH THREW THE
UNGRATEFUL LOAD OF THIS NORTHERN EXPEDITION UPON MYSELF. I ACCEPTED IT
AND ITS DISHONEST IMPLICATION AS OUR ONLY MEANS OF VICTORY. WE TRICKED
THE TURKS AND ENTERED AKABA WITH GOOD FORTUNE.




CHAPTER XXXIX



By May the ninth all things were ready, and in the glare of mid-afternoon
we left Feisal's tent, his good wishes sounding after us from the hill-top
as we marched away. Sherif Nasir led us: his lucent goodness, which
provoked answering devotion even from the depraved, made him the only
leader (and a benediction) for forlorn hopes. When we broke our wishes to
him he had sighed a little, for he was body-weary after months of
vanguard-service, and mind-weary too, with the passing of youth's careless
years. He feared his maturity as it grew upon him, with its ripe thought,
its skill, its finished art; yet which lacked the poetry of boyhood to
make living a full end of life. Physically, he was young yet: but his
changeful and mortal soul was ageing quicker than his body-going to die
before it, like most of ours.

Our short stage was to the fort of Sebeil, inland Wejh, where the
Egyptian pilgrims used to water. We camped by their great brick tank,
in shade of the fort's curtain-wall, or of the palms, and put to rights
the deficiencies which this first march had shown. Auda and his kinsmen
were with us; also Nesib el Bekri, the politic Damascene, to represent
Feisal to the villagers of Syria. Nesib had brains and position, and
the character of a previous, successful, desert-journey: his cheerful
endurance of adventure, rare among Syrians, marked him out as our
fellow, as much as his political mind, his ability, his persuasive
good-humoured eloquence, and the patriotism which often overcame his
native passion for the indirect. Nesib chose Zeki, a Syrian officer, as
his companion. For escort we had thirty-five Ageyl, under ibn
Dgheithir, a man walled into his own temperament: remote, abstracted,
self-sufficient. Feisal made up a purse of twenty thousand pounds in
gold--all he could afford and more than we asked for--to pay the wages of
the new men we hoped to enrol, and to make such advances as should
stimulate the Howeitat to swiftness.

This inconvenient load of four hundredweight of gold we shared out
between us, against the chance of accident upon the road. Sheikh Yusuf,
now back in charge of supply, gave us each a half-bag of flour, whose
forty-five pounds were reckoned a man's pinched ration for six weeks.
This went slung on the riding-saddle, and Nasir took enough on baggage
camels to distribute a further fourteen pounds per man when we had
marched the first fortnight, and had eaten room for it in our bags.

We had a little spare ammunition and some spare rifles as presents; and
loaded six camels with light packs of blasting gelatine for rails or
trains or bridges in the north. Nasir, a great Emir in his own place,
also carried a good tent in which to receive visitors, and a camel load
of rice for their entertainment: but the last we ate between us with
huge comfort, as the unrelieved dietary of water--bread and water, week
after week, grew uninspiring. Being beginners in this style of
travelling, we did not know that dry flour, the lightest food, was
therefore the best for a long journey. Six months later neither Nasir
nor myself wasted transport and trouble on the rice-luxury.

My Ageyl--Mukheymer, Merjan, Ali--had been supplemented by Mohammed, a
blowsy obedient peasant boy from some village in Hauran, and by Gasim,
of Maan, a fanged and yellow-faced outlaw, who fled into the desert to
the Howeitat, after killing a Turkish official in a dispute over cattle
tax. Crimes against tax-gatherers had a sympathetic aspect for all of
us, and this gave Gasim a specious rumour of geniality, which actually
was far from truth.

We seemed a small party to win a new province, and so apparently others
thought; for presently Lamotte, Bremond's representative with Feisal,
rode up to take a farewell photograph of us. A little later Yusuf
arrived, with the good doctor, and Shefik, and Nesib's brothers, to
wish us success on our march. We joined in a spacious evening meal,
whose materials the prudent Yusuf had brought with him. His not-slender
heart perhaps misgave him at the notion of a bread supper: or was it
the beautiful desire to give us a last feast before we were lost in the
wilderness of pain and evil refreshment?

After they had gone we loaded up, and started before midnight on
another stage of our journey to the oasis of Kurr. Nasir, our guide,
had grown to know this country nearly as well as he did his own.

While we rode through the moonlit and starry night, his memory was
dwelling very intimately about his home. He told me of their stone-paved
house whose sunk halls had vaulted roofs against the summer heat,
and of the gardens planted with every kind of fruit tree, in shady
paths about which they could walk at ease, mindless of the sun. He told
me of the wheel over the well, with its machinery of leathern
trip-buckets, raised by oxen upon an inclined path of hard-trodden earth;
and of how the water from its reservoir slid in concrete channels by
the borders of the paths; or worked fountains in the court beside the
great vine-trellised swimming tank, lined with shining cement, within
whose green depth he and his brother's household used to plunge at
midday.

Nasir, though usually merry, had a quick vein of suffering in him, and
to-night he was wondering why he, an Emir of Medina, rich and powerful
and at rest in that garden-palace, had thrown up all to become the weak
leader of desperate adventures in the desert. For two years he had been
outcast, always fighting beyond the front line of Feisal's armies,
chosen for every particular hazard, the pioneer in each advance; and,
meanwhile, the Turks were in his house, wasting his fruit trees and
chopping down his palms. Even, he said, the great well, which had
sounded with the creak of the bullock wheels for six hundred years, had
fallen silent; the garden, cracked with heat, was becoming waste as the
bund hills over which we rode.

After four hours' march we slept for two, and rose with the sun. The
baggage camels, weak with the cursed mange of Wejh, moved slowly,
grazing all day as they went. We riders, light-mounted, might have
passed them easily; but Auda, who was regulating our marches, forbade,
because of the difficulties in front, for which our animals would need
all the fitness we could conserve in them. So we plodded soberly on for
six hours in great heat. The summer sun in this country of white sand
behind Wejh could dazzle the eyes cruelly, and the bare rocks each side
our path threw off waves of heat which made our heads ache and swim.
Consequently, by eleven of the forenoon we were mutinous against Auda's
wish still to hold on. So we halted and lay under trees till half-past
two, each of us trying to make a solid, though shifting shadow for
himself by means of a doubled blanket caught across the thorns of
overhanging boughs.

We rode again, after this break, for three gentle hours over level
bottoms, approaching the walls of a great valley; and found the green
garden of El Kurr lying just in front of us. White tents peeped from
among the palms. While we dismounted, Rasim and Abdulla, Mahmud, the
doctor, and even old Maulud, the cavalryman, came out to welcome us.
They told us that Sherif Sharraf, whom we wished to meet at Abu Raga,
our next stopping place, was away raiding for a few days. This meant
that there was no hurry, so we made holiday at El Kurr for two nights.

It contented me: for the trouble of boils and fever which had shackled
me in Wadi Ais had come afresh, more strongly, making each journey a
pain, and each rest a blessed relaxation of my will strong to go on--a
chance to add patience to a scant reserve. So I lay still, and received
into my mind the sense of peace, the greenness and the presence of
water which made this garden in the desert beautiful and haunting, as
though pre-visited. Or was it merely that long ago we had seen fresh
grass growing in the spring?

The inhabitant of Kurr, the only sedentary Belluwi, hoary Dhaif-Allah,
laboured day and night with his daughters in the little terraced plot
which he had received from his ancestors. It was built out of the south
edge of the valley in a bay defended against flood by a massive wall of
unhewn stone. In its midst opened the well of clear cold water, above
which stood a balance-cantilever of mud and rude poles. By this
Dhaif-Allah, morning and evening when the sun was low, drew up great bowls
of water and spilled them into clay runnels contrived through his garden
among the tree roots. He grew low palms, for their spreading leaves
shaded his plants from the sun which otherwise might in that stark
valley wither them, and raised young tobacco (his most profitable
crop); with smaller plots of beans and melons, cucumbers and egg-plants,
in due season.

The old man lived with his women in a brushwood hut beside the well,
and was scornful of our politics, demanding what more to eat or drink
these sore efforts and bloody sacrifices would bring. We gently teased
him with notions of liberty; with freedom of the Arab countries for the
Arabs. 'This Garden, Dhaif-Allah, should it not be your very own?'
However, he would not understand, but stood up to strike himself
proudly on the chest, crying, 'I--I am Kurr'.

He was free and wanted nothing for others; and only his garden for
himself. Nor did he see why others should not become rich in a like
frugality. His felt skull-cap, greased with sweat to the colour and
consistence of lead, he boasted had been his grandfather's, bought when
Ibrahim Pasha was in Wejh a century before: his other necessary garment
was a shirt, and annually, with his tobacco, he would buy the shirt of
the new year for himself; one for each of his daughters, and one for
the old woman--his wife.

Still we were grateful to him, for, besides that he showed an example
of contentment to us slaves of unnecessary appetite, he sold vegetables
and on them, and on the tinned bounty of Rasim and Abdulla and Mahmud,
we lived richly. Each evening round the fires they had music, not the
monotonous open-throated roaring of the tribes, nor the exciting
harmony of the Ageyl, but the falsetto quarter tones and trills of
urban Syria. Maulud had musicians in his unit; and bashful soldiers
were brought up each evening to play guitars and sing cafe songs of
Damascus or the love verses of their villages. In Abdulla's tent, where
I was lodged, distance, the ripple of the fragrant out-pouring water,
and the tree-leaves softened the music, so that it became dully
pleasant to the ear.

Often, too, Nesib el Bekri would take out his manuscript of the songs
of Selim el Jezairi, that fierce unscrupulous revolutionary who, in his
leisure moments between campaigns, the Staff College, and the bloody
missions he fulfilled for the Young Turks, his masters, had made up
verses in the common speech of the people about the freedom which was
coming to his race. Nesib and his friends had a swaying rhythm in which
they would chant these songs, putting all hope and passion into the
words, their pale Damascus faces moon-large in the firelight, sweating.
The soldier camp would grow dead silent till the stanza ended, and then
from every man would come a sighing, longing echo of the last note.
Only old Dhaif-Allah went on splashing out his water, sure that after
we had finished with our silliness someone would yet need and buy his
greenstuff.




CHAPTER XL



To townsmen this garden was a memory of the world before we went mad
with war and drove ourselves into the desert: to Auda there was an
indecency of exhibition in the plant-richness, and he longed for an
empty view. So we cut short our second night in paradise, and at two in
the morning went on up the valley. It was pitch dark, the very stars in
the sky being unable to cast light into the depths where we were
wandering. To-night Auda was guide, and to make us sure of him he
lifted up his voice in an interminable Tio, ho, ho' song of the
Howeitat; an epic chanted on three bass notes, up and down, back and
forward, in so round a voice that the words were indistinguishable.
After a little we thanked him for the singing, since the path went away
to the left, and our long line followed his turn by the echoes of his
voice rolling about the torn black cliffs in the moonlight.

On this long journey Sherif Nasir and Auda's sour-smiling cousin,
Mohammed el Dheilan, took pains with my Arabic, giving me by turn
lessons in the classical Medina tongue, and in the vivid desert
language. At the beginning my Arabic had been a halting command of the
tribal dialects of the Middle Euphrates (a not impure form), but now it
became a fluent mingling of Hejaz slang and north-tribal poetry with
household words and phrases from the limpid Nejdi, and book forms from
Syria. The fluency had a lack of grammar, which made my talk a
perpetual adventure for my hearers. Newcomers imagined I must be the
native of some unknown illiterate district; a shot-rubbish ground of
disjected Arabic parts of speech.

However, as yet I understood not three words of Auda's, and after half
an hour his chant tired me, while the old moon climbed slowly up the
sky, sailed over the topmost hills and threw a deceitful light, less
sure than darkness, into our valley. We marched until the early sun,
very trying to those who had ridden all night, opposed us.

Breakfast was off our own flour, thus lightening at last, after days of
hospitality, our poor camels' food-load. Sharraf being not yet in Abu
Raga, we made no more of haste than water-difficulties compelled; and,
after food, again put up our blanket roofs and lay till afternoon,
fretfully dodging after their unstable shadow, getting moist with heat
and the constant pricking of flies.

At last Nasir gave the marching signal, and we went on up the defile,
with slightly pompous hills each side, for four hours; when we agreed
to camp again in the valley bed. There was abundant brushwood for fuel;
and up the cliff on our right were rock-pools of fresh water, which
gave us a delicious drink. Nasir was wrought up; he commanded rice for
supper, and the friends to feed with us.

Our rule of march was odd and elaborate. Nasir, Auda, and Nesib were so
many separate, punctilious houses, admitting the supremacy of Nasir
only because I lived with him as a guest and furnished them with the
example of respect. Each required to be consulted on the details of our
going, and where and when we should halt. This was inevitable with
Auda, a child of battle who had never known a master, since, as a tiny
boy, he had first ridden his own camel. It was advisable with Nesib, a
Syrian of the queasy Syrian race; jealous; hostile to merit, or to its
acknowledgement.

Such people demanded a war-cry and banner from outside to combine them,
and a stranger to lead them, one whose supremacy should be based on an
idea: illogical, undeniable, discriminant: which instinct might accept
and reason find no rational basis to reject or approve. For this army
of Feisal's the conceit was that an Emir of Mecca, a descendant of the
prophet, a Sherif, was an otherworldly dignitary whom sons of Adam
might reverence without shame. This was the binding assumption of the
Arab movement; it was this which gave it an effective, if imbecile
unanimity.

In the morning we rode at five. Our valley pinched together, and we
went round a sharp spur, ascending steeply. The track became a bad
goat-path, zigzagging up a hill-side too precipitous to climb except on
all fours. We dropped off our camels and led them by the head-stalls.
Soon we had to help each other, a man urging the camels from behind,
another pulling them from the front, encouraging them over the worst
places, adjusting their loads to ease them.

Parts of the track were dangerous, where rocks bulged out and narrowed
it, so that the near half of the load grazed and forced the animal to
the cliff-edge. We had to re-pack the food and explosives; and, in
spite of all our care, lost two of our feeble camels in the pass. The
Howeitat killed them where they lay broken, stabbing a keen dagger into
the throat-artery near the chest, while the neck was strained tight by
pulling the head round to the saddle. They were at once cut up and
shared out as meat.

The head of the pass we were glad to find not a range but a spacious
plateau which sloped slowly before us to the east. The first yards were
rough and rocky, overgrown with low mats of thorns like ling; but
afterwards we came to a valley of white shingle, in whose bed a Beduin
woman was filling her water-skin with a copper cup, ladling milky
water, quite pure and sweet, from a little hole a foot wide, scraped
elbow deep in the pebbles. This was Abu Saad, and for its name's sake
and for its water, and the joints of red meat bumping on our saddles,
we settled we would stay here one night, filling up yet more of the
time which must be filled before Sharraf came back from his expedition
against the railway.

So we rode on four more miles, to camp under spreading trees, in
close-grown thickets of thorn-scrub, hollow underneath like booths. By
day these made tent-ribs for our blankets stretched against the masterful
sun. At night they were bowers for our sleeping-places. We had learned
to sleep with nothing overhead but moon and stars, and nothing either
side to keep distant the winds and noises of the night; and by contrast
it was strange, but quieting, to rest within walls, with a roof above;
even though walls and roof were only interlacing twigs making a darker
mesh against the star-scattered sky.

For myself, I was ill again; a fever increasing upon me, and my body
very sore with boils and the rubbing of my sweaty saddle. When Nasir,
without my prompting, had halted at the half-stage, I turned and
thanked him warmly, to his astonishment. We were now on the limestone
of the Shefa crest. Before us lay a great dark lava-field, and short of
it a range of red and black banded sandstone cliffs with conical tops.
The air on the high tableland was not so warm; and morning and evening
there blew across us a free current which was refreshing after the
suspended stillness of the valleys.

We breakfasted on our camel meat, and started more gaily the next
morning down a gently-falling plateau of red sandstone. Then we came to
the first break of surface, a sharp passage to the bottom of a
shrub-grown, sandy valley, on each side of which sandstone precipices and
pinnacles, gradually growing in height as we went down, detached
themselves sharply against the morning sky. It was shadowed in the
bottom, and the air tasted wet and decayed, as though sap was drying
out into it. The edges of the cliffs about us were clipped strangely,
like fantastic parapets. We wound on, ever deeper into the earth until,
half an hour later, by a sharp corner we entered Wadi Jizil, the main
gutter of these sandstone regions, whose end we had seen near Hedia.

Jizil was a deep gorge some two hundred yards in width, full of
tamarisk sprouting from the bed of drifted sand, as well as from the
soft twenty-foot banks, heaped up wherever an eddy in flood or wind had
laid the heavier dust under the returns of cliffs. The walls each side
were of regular bands of sandstone, streaked red in many shades. The
union of dark cliffs, pink floors, and pale green shrubbery was
beautiful to eyes sated with months of sunlight and sooty shadow. When
evening came, the declining sun crimsoned one side of the valley with
its glow, leaving the other in purple gloom.

Our camp was on some swelling dunes of weedy sand in an elbow of the
valley, where a narrow cleft had set up a back-wash and scooped out a
basin in which a brackish remnant of last winter's flood was caught. We
sent a man for news up the valley to an oleander thicket where we saw
the white peaks of Sharraf's tents. They expected him next day; so we
passed two nights in this strange-coloured, echoing place. The brackish
pool was fit for our camels, and in it we bathed at noon. Then we ate
and slept generously, and wandered in the nearer valleys to see the
horizontal stripes of pink and brown and cream and red which made up
the general redness of the cliffs, delighting in the varied patterns of
thin pencillings of lighter or darker tint which were drawn over the
plain body of rock. One afternoon I spent behind some shepherd's fold
of sandstone blocks in warm soft air and sunlight, with a low burden of
the wind plucking at the rough wall-top above my head. The valley was
instinct with peace, and the wind's continuing noise made even it seem
patient.

My eyes were shut and I was dreaming, when a youthful voice made me see
an anxious Ageyli, a stranger, Daud, squatting by me. He appealed for
my compassion. His friend Farraj had burned their tent in a frolic, and
Saad, captain of Sharraf's Ageyl was going to beat him in punishment.
At my intercession he would be released. Saad happened, just then, to
visit me, and I put it to him, while Daud sat watching us, his mouth
slightly, eagerly, open; his eyelids narrowed over large, dark eyes,
and his straight brows furrowed with anxiety. Daud's pupils, set a
little in from the centre of the eyeball, gave him an air of acute
readiness.

Saad's reply was not comforting. The pair were always in trouble, and
of late so outrageous in their tricks that Sharraf, the severe, had
ordered an example to be made of them. All he could do for my sake was
to let Daud share the ordained sentence. Daud leaped at the chance,
kissed my hand and Saad's and ran off up the valley; while Saad,
laughing, told me stories of the famous pair. They were an instance of
the eastern boy and boy affection which the segregation of women made
inevitable. Such friendships often led to manly loves of a depth and
force beyond our flesh-steeped conceit. When innocent they were hot and
unashamed. If sexuality entered, they passed into a give and take,
unspiritual relation, like marriage.

Next day Sharraf did not come. Our morning passed with Auda talking of
the march in front, while Nasir with forefinger and thumb flicked
sputtering matches from the box across his tent at us. In the midst of
our merriment two bent figures, with pain in their eyes, but crooked
smiles upon their lips, hobbled up and saluted. These were Daud the
hasty and his love-fellow, Farraj; a beautiful, soft-framed, girlish
creature, with innocent, smooth face and swimming eyes. They said they
were for my service. I had no need of them; and objected that after
their beating they could not ride. They replied they had now come
bare-backed. I said I was a simple man who disliked servants about him.
Daud turned away, defeated and angry; but Farraj pleaded that we must have
men, and they would follow me for company and out of gratitude. While
the harder Daud revolted, he went over to Nasir and knelt in appeal,
all the woman of him evident in his longing. At the end, on Nasir's
advice, I took them both, mainly because they looked so young and
clean.




CHAPTER XLI



Sharraf delayed to come until the third morning, but then we heard him
loudly, for the Arabs of his raiding force fired slow volleys of shots
into the air, and the echoes were thrown about the windings of the
valley till even the barren hills seemed to join in the salute. We
dressed in our cleanest to go and call on him. Auda wore the splendours
he had bought at Wejh: a mouse-coloured greatcoat of broadcloth with
velvet collar, and yellow elastic-sided boots: these below his
streaming hair and ruined face of a tired tragedian! Sharraf was kind
to us, for he had captured prisoners on the line and blown up rails and
a culvert. One piece of his news was that in Wadi Diraa, on our road,
were pools of rain-water, new fallen and sweet. This would shorten our
waterless march to Fejr by fifty miles, and remove its danger of
thirst; a great benefit, for our total water carriage came to about
twenty gallons, for fifty men; too slender a margin of safety.

Next day we left Abu Raga near mid-afternoon, not sorry, for this
beautiful place had been unhealthy for us and fever had bothered us
during our three days in its confined bed. Auda led us up a tributary
valley which soon widened into the plain of the Shegg--a sand flat.
About it, in scattered confusion, sat small islands and pinnacles of
red sandstone, grouped like seracs, wind-eroded at the bases till they
looked very fit to fall and block the road; which wound in and out
between them, through narrows seeming to give no passage, but always
opening into another bay of blind alleys. Through this maze Auda led
unhesitatingly; digging along on his camel, elbows out, hands poised
swaying in the air by his shoulders.

There were no footmarks on the ground, for each wind swept like a great
brush over the sand surface, stippling the traces of the last
travellers till the surface was again a pattern of innumerable tiny
virgin waves. Only the dried camel droppings, which were lighter than
the sand and rounded like walnuts, escaped over its ripples.

They rolled about, to be heaped in corners by the skirling winds. It
was perhaps by them, as much as by his unrivalled road-sense, that Auda
knew the way. For us, the rock shapes were constant speculation and
astonishment; their granular surfaces and red colour and the curved
chiselling of the sand-blast upon them softened the sunlight, to give
our streaming eyes relief.

In the mid-march we perceived five or six riders coming from the
railway. I was in front with Auda, and we had that delicious thrill:
fiend or enemy?' of meeting strangers in the desert, whilst we
circumspectly drew across to the vantage side which kept the rifle-arm
free for a snap shot; but when they came nearer we saw they were of the
Arab forces. The first, riding loosely on a hulking camel, with the
unwieldy Manchester-made timber saddle of the British Camel Corps, was
a fair-haired, shaggy-bearded Englishman in tattered uniform. This we
guessed must be Hornby, Newcombe's pupil, the wild engineer who vied
with him in smashing the railway. After we had exchanged greetings, on
this our first meeting, he told me that Newcombe had lately gone to
Wejh to talk over his difficulties with Feisal and make fresh plans to
meet them.

Newcombe had constant difficulties owing to excess of zeal, and his
habit of doing four times more than any other Englishman would do; ten
times what the Arabs thought needful or wise. Hornby spoke little
Arabic; and Newcombe not enough to persuade, though enough to give
orders; but orders were not in place inland. The persistent pair would
cling for weeks to the railway edge, almost without helpers, often
without food, till they had exhausted either explosives or camels and
had to return for more. The barrenness of the hills made their trips
hungry for camels, and they wore out Feisal's best animals in turn. In
this Newcombe was chief sinner, for his journeys were done at the trot;
also, as a surveyor, he could not resist a look from each high hill
over the country he crossed, to the exasperation of his escort who must
either leave him to his own courses (a lasting disgrace to abandon a
companion of the road), or founder their own precious and irreplaceable
camels in keeping pace with him. 'Newcombe is like fire,' they used to
complain; Tie burns friend and enemy'; and they admired his amazing
energy with nervous shrinking lest they should be his next friendly
victims.

Arabs told me Newcombe would not sleep except head on rails, and that
Hornby would worry the metals with his teeth when gun-cotton failed.
These were legends, but behind them lay a sense of their joint
insatiate savagery in destroying till there was no more to destroy.
Four Turkish labour battalions they kept busy, patching culverts,
relaying sleepers, jointing new rails; and gun-cotton had to come in
increasing tons to Wejh to meet their appetites. They were wonderful,
but their too-great excellence discouraged our feeble teams, making
them ashamed to exhibit their inferior talent: so Newcombe and Hornby
remained as individualists, barren of the seven-fold fruits of
imitation.

At sunset we reached the northern limit of the ruined sandstone land,
and rode up to a new level, sixty feet higher than the old, blue-black
and volcanic, with a scattered covering of worn basalt-blocks, small as
a man's hand, neatly bedded like cobble paving over a floor of fine,
hard, black cinder-debris of themselves. The rain in its long pelting
seemed to have been the agent of these stony surfaces by washing away
the lighter dust from above and between, till the stones, set closely
side by side and as level as a carpet, covered all the face of the
plain and shielded from direct contact with weather the salty mud which
filled the interstices of the lava flow beneath. It grew easier going,
and Auda ventured to carry on after the light had failed, marching upon
the Polar Star.

It was very dark; a pure night enough, but the black stone underfoot
swallowed the light of the stars, and at seven o'clock, when at last we
halted, only four of our party were with us. We had reached a gentle
valley, with a yet damp, soft, sandy bed, full of thorny brushwood,
unhappily useless as camel food. We ran about tearing up these bitter
bushes by the roots and heaping them in a great pyre, which Auda lit.
When the fire grew hot a long black snake wormed slowly out into our
group; we must have gathered it, torpid, with the twigs. The flames
went shining across the dark flat, a beacon to the heavy camels which
had lagged so much to-day that it was two hours before the last group
arrived, the men singing their loudest, partly to encourage themselves
and their hungry animals over the ghostly plain, partly so that we
might know them friends. We wished their slowness slower, because of
our warm fire. In the night some of our camels strayed and our people
had to go looking for them so long, that it was nearly eight o'clock,
and we had baked bread and eaten, before again we started. Our track
lay across more lava-field, but to our morning strength the stones
seemed rarer, and waves or hard surfaces of laid sand often drowned
them smoothly with a covering as good to march on as a tennis court. We
rode fast over this for six or seven miles, and then turned west of a
low cinder-crater across the flat, dark, stony watershed which divided
Jizil from the basin in which the railway ran. These great water
systems up here at their springing were shallow, sandy beds, scoring
involved yellow lines across the blue-black plain. From our height the
lie of the land was patent for miles, with the main features coloured
in layers, like a map.

We marched steadily till noon, and then sat out on the bare ground till
three; an uneasy halt made necessary by our fear that the dejected
camels, so long accustomed only to the sandy tracks of the coastal
plain, might have their soft feet scorched by the sun-baked stones, and
go lame with us on the road. After we mounted, the going became worse,
and we had continually to avoid large fields of piled basalt, or deep
yellow watercourses which cut through the crust into the soft stone
beneath. After a while red sandstone again cropped out in crazy
chimneys, from which the harder layers projected knife-sharp in level
shelves beyond the soft, crumbling rock. At last these sandstone ruins
became plentiful, in the manner of yesterday, and stood grouped about
our road in similar chequered yards of light and shade. Again we
marvelled at the sureness with which Auda guided our little party
through the mazy rocks.

They passed, and we re-entered volcanic ground. Little pimply craters
stood about, often two or three together, and from them spines of high,
broken basalt led down like disordered causeways across the barren
ridges; but these craters looked old, not sharp and well-kept like
those of Ras Gara, near Wadi Ais, but worn and degraded, sometimes
nearly to surface level by a great bay broken into their central
hollow. The basalt which ran out from them was a coarse bubbled rock,
like Syrian dolerite. The sand-laden winds had ground its exposed
surfaces to a pitted smoothness like orange-rind, and the sunlight had
faded out its blue to a hopeless grey.

Between craters the basalt was strewn in small tetrahedra, with angles
rubbed and rounded, stone tight to stone like tesseract upon a bed of
pink-yellow mud. The ways worn across such flats by the constant
passage of camels were very evident, since the slouching tread had
pushed the blocks to each side of the path, and the thin mud of wet
weather had run into these hollows and now inlaid them palely against
the blue. Less-used roads for hundreds of yards were like narrow
ladders across the stone-fields, for the tread of each foot was filled
in with clean yellow mud, and ridges or bars of the blue-grey stone
remained between each stepping place. After a stretch of such stone-laying
would be a field of jet-black basalt cinders, firm as concrete
in tie sun-baked mud, and afterwards a valley of soft, black sand, with
more crags of weathered sandstone rising from the blackness, or from
waves of the wind-blown red and yellow grains of their own decay.

Nothing in the march was normal or reassuring. We felt we were in an
ominous land, incapable of life, hostile even to the passing of life,
except painfully along such sparse roads as time had laid across its
face. We were forced into a single file of weary camels, picking a
hesitant way step by step through the boulders for hour after hour. At
last Auda pointed ahead to a fifty-foot ridge of large twisted blocks,
lying coursed one upon the other as they had writhed and shrunk in
their cooling. There was the limit of lava; and he and I rode on
together and saw in front of us an open rolling plain (Wadi Aish) of
fine scrub and golden sand, with green bushes scattered here and there.
It held a very little water in holes which someone had scooped after
the rainstorm of three weeks ago. We camped by them and drove our
unladen camels out till sunset, to graze for the first adequate time
since Abu Raga.

While they were scattered over the land, mounted men appeared on the
horizon to the east, making towards the water. They came on too quickly
to be honest, and fired at our herdsmen; but the rest of us ran at once
upon the scattered reefs and knolls, shooting or shouting. Hearing us
so many they drew off as fast as their camels would go; and from the
ridge in the dusk we saw them, a bare dozen in all, scampering away
towards the line. We were glad to see them avoid us so thoroughly. Auda
thought they were a Shammar patrol.

At dawn we saddled up for the short stage to Diraa, the water pools of
which Sharraf had told us. The first miles were through the grateful
sand and scrub of Wadi Aish, and afterwards we crossed a simple lava
flat. Then came a shallow valley, more full of sandstone pillars and
mushrooms and pinnacles than anywhere yesterday. It was a mad country,
of nine-pins from ten to sixty feet in height. The sand-paths between
them were wide enough for one only, and our long column wound blindly
through, seldom a dozen of us having common sight at once. This ragged
thicket of stone was perhaps a third of a mile in width, and stretched
like a red copse to right and left across our path.

Beyond it a graded path over black ledges of rotten stone led us to a
plateau strewn with small, loose, blue-black basalt shards. After a
while we entered Wadi Diraa and marched down its bed for an hour or
more, sometimes over loose grey stone, sometimes along a sandy bottom
between low lips of rock. A deserted camp with empty sardine tins gave
proof of Newcombe and Hornby. Behind were the limpid pools, and we
halted there till afternoon; for we were now quite near the railway,
and had to drink our stomachs full and fill our few water-skins, ready
for the long dash to Fejr.

In the halt Auda came down to see Farraj and Daud dress my camel with
butter for relief against the intolerable itch of mange which had
broken out recently on its face. The dry pasturage of the Billi country
and the infected ground of Wejh had played havoc with our beasts. In ahl
Feisal's stud of riding-camels there was not one healthy; in our
little expedition every camel was weakening daily. Nasir was full of
anxiety lest many break down in the forced march before us and leave
their riders stranded in the desert.

We had no medicines for mange and could do little for it in spite of
our need. However, the rubbing and anointing did make my animal more
comfortable, and we repeated it as often as Farraj or Daud could find
butter in our party. These two boys were giving me great satisfaction.
They were brave and cheerful beyond the average of Arab servant-kind.
As their aches and pains wore off they showed themselves active, good
riders, and willing workmen. I liked their freedom towards myself and
admired their instinctive understanding with one another against the
demands of the world.




CHAPTER XLII



By a quarter to four we were in the saddle, going down Wadi Diraa, into
steep and high ridges of shifting sand, sometimes with a cap of harsh
red rock jutting from them. After a while, three or four of us, in
advance of the main body, climbed a sand-peak on hands and knees to spy
out the railway. There was no air, and the exercise was more than we
required; but our reward was immediate, for the line showed itself
quiet and deserted-looking, on a green flat at the mouth of the deep
valley down which the rest of the company was marching circumspectly
with ready weapons.

We checked the men at the bottom of their narrow sand-fold, whilst we
studied the railway. Everything was indeed peaceful and empty, even to
the abandoned blockhouse in a rich patch of rank grass and weeds
between us and the line. We ran to the edge of the rock-shelf, leaped
out from it into the fine dry sand, and rolled down in a magnificent
slide till we came to an abrupt and rather bruising halt in the level
ground beside the column. We mounted, to hurry our camels out to the
grazing, and leaving them there ran over to the railway and shouted the
others on.

This unmolested crossing was blessed, for Sharraf had warned us
seriously against the enemy patrols of mule-riding infantry and camel
corps, reinforced from the entrenched posts by infantry on trolleys
mounting machine-guns. Our riding-beasts we chased into the grass to
feed for a few minutes, while the heavy camels marched over the valley,
the line, and the farther flat, till sheltered in the sand and rock
mouths of the country beyond the railway. Meanwhile the Ageyl amused us
by fixing gun-cotton or gelatine charges about our crossing-place to as
many of the rails as we had time to reach, and when our munching camels
had been dragged away into safety on the far side of the line, we
began, in proper order, to light the fuses, filling the hollow valley
with the echoes of repeated bursts.

Auda had not before known dynamite, and with a child's first pleasure
was moved to a rush of hasty poetry on its powerful glory. We cut three
telegraph wires, and fastened the free ends to the saddles of six
riding-camels of the Howeitat. The astonished team struggled far into
the eastern valleys with the growing weight of twanging, tangling wire
and the bursting poles dragging after them. At last they could no
longer move. So we cut them loose and rode laughing after the caravan.

For five miles we proceeded in the growing dusk, between ridges which
seemed to run down like fingers from some knuckle in front of us. At
last their rise and fall became too sharp to be crossed with safety by
our weak animals in the dark, and we halted. The baggage and the bulk
of our riders were still ahead of us, keeping the advantage they had
gained while we played with the railway. In the night we could not find
them, for the Turks were shouting hard and shooting at shadows from
their stations on the line behind us; and we judged it prudent to keep
quiet ourselves, not lighting fires nor sending up signals to attract
attention.

However, ibn Dgheithir, in charge of the main body, had left a
connecting file behind, and so before we had fallen asleep, two men
came in to us, and reported that the rest were securely camped in the
hidden fold of a steep sand-bank a little further on. We threw our
saddle-bags again across our camels, and plodded after our guides in
the murky dark (to-night was almost the last night of the moon) till we
reached their hushed picket on the ridge, and bedded ourselves down
beside them without words.

In the morning Auda had us afoot before four, going uphill, till at
last we climbed a ridge, and plunged over, down a sand slope. Into it
our camels sank knee-deep, held upright despite themselves by its
clinging. They were able to make forward only by casting themselves on
and down its loose face, breaking their legs out of it by their bodies'
weight. At the bottom we found ourselves in the head-courses of a
valley, which trended towards the railway. Another half-hour took us to
the springing of this, and we breasted the low edge of the plateau
which was the watershed between Hejaz and Sirhan. Ten yards more, and
we were beyond the Red Sea slope of Arabia, fairly embarked upon the
mystery of its central drainage.

Seemingly it was a plain, with an illimitable view downhill to the
east, where one gentle level after another slowly modulated into a
distance only to be called distance because it was a softer blue, and
more hazy. The rising sun flooded this falling plain with a perfect
level of light, throwing up long shadows of almost imperceptible
ridges, and the whole life and play of a complicated ground-system--but
a transient one; for, as we looked at it, the shadows drew in towards
the dawn, quivered a last moment behind their mother-banks, and went
out as though at a common signal. Full morning had begun: the river of
sunlight, sickeningly in the full-face of us moving creatures, poured
impartially on every stone of the desert over which we had to go.

Auda struck out north-eastward, aiming for a little saddle which joined
the low ridge of Ugula to a lofty hill on the divide, to our left or
north about three miles away. We crossed the saddle after four miles,
and found beneath our feet little shallow runnels of water-courses in
the ground. Auda pointed to them, saying that they ran to Nebk in
Sirhan, and that we would follow their swelling bed northward and
eastward to the Howeitat in their summer camp.

A little later we were marching over a low ridge of slivers of
sandstone with the nature of slate, sometimes quite small, but other
times great slabs ten feet each way and, perhaps, four inches thick.
Auda ranged up beside my camel, and pointing with his riding-stick told
me to write down on my map the names and nature of the land. The
valleys on our left were the Seyal Abu Arad, rising in Selhub, and fed
by many successors from the great divide, as it prolonged itself
northward to Jebel Rufeiya by Tebuk. The valleys on our right were the
Siyul el Kelb, from Ugula, Agidat el Jemelein, Lebda and the other
ridges which bent round us in a strung bow eastward and north-eastward
carrying the great divide as it were in a foray out across the plain.
These two water systems united fifty miles before us in Fejr, which was
a tribe, its well, and the valley of its well. I cried Auda mercy of
his names, swearing I was no writer-down of unspoiled countries, or
pandar to geographical curiosity; and the old man, much pleased, began
to tell me personal notes and news of the chiefs with us, and in front
upon our line of march. His prudent talk whiled away the slow passage
of abominable desolation.

The Fejr Bedouin, whose property it was, called our plain El Houl
because it was desolate; and to-day we rode in it without seeing signs
of life; no tracks of gazelle, no lizards, no burrowing of rats, not
even any birds. We, ourselves, felt tiny in it, and our urgent progress
across its immensity was a stillness or immobility of futile effort.
The only sounds were the hollow echoes, like the shutting down of
pavements over vaulted places, of rotten stone slab on stone slab when
they tilted under our camels' feet; and the low but piercing rustle of
the sand, as it crept slowly westward before the hot wind along the
worn sandstone, under the harder overhanging caps which gave each reef
its eroded, rind-like shape.

It was a breathless wind, with the furnace taste sometimes known in
Egypt when a khamsin came; and, as the day went on and the sun rose in
the sky it grew stronger, more filled with the dust of the Nefudh, the
great sand desert of Northern Arabia, close by us over there, but
invisible through the haze. By noon it blew a half-gale, so dry that
our shrivelled lips cracked open, and the skin of our faces chapped;
while our eyelids, gone granular, seemed to creep back and bare our
shrinking eyes. The Arabs drew their head-clothes tightly across their
noses, and pulled the brow-folds forward like vizors with only a
narrow, loose-flapping slit of vision.

At this stifling price they kept their flesh unbroken, for they feared
the sand particles which would wear open the chaps into a painful
wound: but, for my own part, I always rather liked a khamsin, since its
torment seemed to fight against mankind with ordered conscious
malevolence, and it was pleasant to outface it so directly, challenging
its strength, and conquering its extremity. There was pleasure also in
the salt sweat-drops which ran singly down the long hair over my
forehead, and dripped like ice-water on my cheek. At first, I played at
catching them in my mouth; but, as we rode further into the desert and
the hours passed, the wind became stronger, thicker in dust, more
terrible in heat. All semblance of friendly contest passed. My camel's
pace became sufficient increase to the irritation of the choking waves,
whose dryness broke my skin and made my throat so painful that for
three days afterwards I could eat little of our stodgy bread. When
evening at last came to us I was content that my burned face still felt
the other and milder air of darkness.

We plodded on all the day (even without the wind forbidding us there
could have been no more luxury-halts under the shadow of blankets, if
we would arrive unbroken men with strong camels at el Fejr), and
nothing made us widen an eye or think a thought till after three in the
afternoon. Then, above two natural tumuli, we came to a cross-ridge
swelling at last into a hill. Auda huskily spat extra names at me.

Beyond it a long slope, slow degrees of a washed gravel surface with
stripings of an occasional torrent-bed, went down westward. Auda and I
trotted ahead together for relief against the intolerable slowness of
the caravan. This side the sunset glow a modest wall of hills barred
our way to the north. Shortly afterwards the Seil abu Arad, turning
east, swept along our front in a bed a fair mile wide; it was inches
deep with scrub as dry as dead wood, which crackled and split with
little spurts of dust when we began to gather it for a fire to show the
others where we had made the halt. We gathered and gathered vigorously,
till we had a great cock ready for lighting. Then we found that neither
of us had a match.

The mass did not arrive for an hour or more, when the wind had
altogether died away, and the evening, calm and black and full of
stars, had come down on us. Auda set a watch through the night, for
this district was in the line of raiding parties, and in the hours of
darkness there were no friends in Arabia. We had covered about fifty
miles this day; all we could at a stretch, and enough according to our
programme. So we halted the night hours; partly because our camels were
weak and ill, and grazing meant much to them, and partly because the
Howeitat were not intimate with this country, and feared to lose their
way if they should ride too boldly without seeing.




CHAPTER XLIII



Before dawn the following day we started down the bed of Seil Abu Arad
till the white sun came up over the Zibliyat hills ahead of us. We
turned more north to cut off an angle of the valley, and halted for
half an hour till we saw the main body coming. Then Auda, Nasir and
myse