Lawrence In Arabia Part 9

By October, however, the time for such dithering had come to an end. The Turkish garrison in Medina was now stronger than at the revolt's outset, having been reinforced by rail, and had recently pummeled a rebel attack force led by Faisal, Hussein's third son. With Faisal's warriors now withdrawn into the mountains, there were clear signs that the Turks were preparing to march out of Medina with the goal of both splitting the rebel armies in two and wresting back control of Mecca. In response to the crisis, and to the increasingly anxious appeals of his sons from their various battlefronts, Hussein had finally acceded to the deployment of British troops to the Hejaz.

It was this development that was bringing Ronald Storrs to Jeddah for the third time. In answer to Hussein's request, and over the grumblings of General Murray in Cairo, the British War Committee in London had just agreed to send a brigade of British troops to the Hejaz-anywhere between three and five thousand soldiers-along with a fleet of airplanes. For the Oriental secretary, the opportunity to be the bearer of good news, together with the companions.h.i.+p of T. E. Lawrence, at least partially compensated for the growing distaste he felt for these tedious voyages and for the town of Jeddah itself.

Lawrence had been quite aware of the intense debate that the Arab Revolt had sp.a.w.ned in the upper reaches of the British war machine over the previous months. That awareness came both from his perch within the Cairo intelligence apparatus-the revolt had begun less than two weeks after his return from Iraq-and from his friends.h.i.+p with Storrs. Still, with his area of expertise centered squarely on Syria, he'd remained very much on the outside of these deliberations. In fact, by the time he joined Storrs on the Lama that October, his chief contribution to the Hejaz effort could hardly have been more prosaic: postage stamps.

In thinking of how to counteract Turkey's blanket silence on the Arab Revolt in its early days, Storrs had struck upon the idea of issuing "Republic of Hejaz" postage stamps, a cheap and effective way to prove to the outside world that a break had occurred. When he'd asked Emir Hussein for a suitably Islamic design, however, the resulting sketch bore an eerie resemblance to an English lighthouse. Storrs had then enlisted the help of his most learned Arabist friend, Lawrence, and the two spent a leisurely afternoon wandering the Arab Museum in Cairo selecting suitable motifs. Since, as Storrs related, "it was quickly apparent that Lawrence already possessed or had immediately a.s.similated a complete working technique of philatelic and three-colour reproduction," the Oriental secretary placed his friend in charge of getting the stamps made.

The postage stamp project coincided with a particularly trying time for Lawrence. Ever since coming to Cairo, he and the other eccentrics in Stewart Newcombe's tiny political intelligence unit at the Savoy had been officially attached to the resident Egyptian army, an arrangement Lawrence was quite happy with since the alternative was to fall under the umbrella of the ponderous and fiercely hierarchical structure of General Murray's Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF), the "regular" army tasked to take the war to the Turks. However, as part of a bureaucratic reorganization that summer-one of a half dozen wartime reorganizations of the British administration in Cairo that sowed chaos each time-Lawrence had been transferred into an intelligence unit wholly under EEF control. Worse, the rea.s.signment placed Lawrence under the direction of a commanding officer he had little respect for, and required he leave Cairo for the sleepy Suez Ca.n.a.l port town of Ismailia. Lawrence had swiftly requested a transfer back to "the Intrusives" (the name the Savoy Hotel unit had chosen for itself in recognition of their repute within the military bureaucracy), but been just as swiftly denied. "I interpreted this," Lawrence wrote, "not without some friendly evidence, as a method of keeping me away from the Arab affair."

But Lawrence was nothing if not resourceful, and he had next thought to put one of his more p.r.o.nounced personality traits to good use: the ability to annoy. With his new colleagues in Ismailia, he noted, "I took every opportunity to run 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."

The strategy worked. In late September 1916, upon learning of Ronald Storrs's upcoming voyage to Jeddah, Lawrence requested a ten-day leave from his new post, which his aggravated superiors were only too happy to grant. In just this way, and in no official capacity save entourage to Ronald Storrs, Lawrence set sail for Arabia for the first time.

Shortly after dawn on October 16, the Lama entered the wide bay of Jeddah harbor and made for the port on its sheltered far sh.o.r.e. In the early sun, Lawrence observed only light and shadow among the buildings of that town, while beyond it was "the dazzle of league after league of featureless sand." As the steamer approached its berth, he was to experience that phenomenon common to most who approach Arabia from the water, that moment when the sea-cooled air abruptly collides with that blowing off the land. As Lawrence would write, it was at that instant when "the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless."

IT WAS AN awkward meeting papered over with British politeness. Coming off the Lama in midmorning, Storrs and Lawrence made the short walk through Jeddah's narrow streets to the handsome three-story building that housed the British consulate, there to be greeted by the resident British agent, Lieutenant Colonel Cyril Wilson. Wilson led his visitors into a cool and pleasingly shuttered reception room-it was not yet ten o'clock, but the whitewashed buildings of Jeddah already radiated a blinding glare-and ordered up refreshments.

Ronald Storrs had long acquaintance with the slender, mustachioed Wilson, a career army officer previously attached to the British administration in the Sudan, but time had done nothing to improve his opinion of the man. He found Wilson dull and irritable, with a hint of the hysteric-"totally unsuited for anything beyond provincial administration," he'd once written-and thus completely out of his depth in the important position he'd a.s.sumed in July, that of British representative to Emir Hussein's Hejaz "government." In fact, the chief reason Storrs hadn't raised his objections to Wilson more forcefully back in Cairo was out of mortal fear that should the man be sacked, Storrs himself might be sent to Jeddah as his replacement.

For his part, Wilson seemed to resent these visits by the Oriental secretary, the automatic deference shown him by Emir Hussein and his emissaries while he, the officer on the ground, saw to all the frustrating and thankless spadework of British policy.

There was also a bit of history between Wilson and Lawrence. Some months earlier in Cairo, the lieutenant colonel had spotted Lawrence wearing an Arab headdress while in uniform, and soundly rebuked him for the offense. There was little indication the intelligence officer had taken the criticisms of his appearance to heart in the interim, however, judging by the sweat-stained uniform with which Lawrence had arrived at the consulate door.

Still, all those in the reception room being British, none of this friction was voiced or even acknowledged. Instead, Storrs and Wilson feigned collegiality as they discussed the current situation in the Hejaz and that day's schedule. In adherence to Arab custom, the first order of business was for them to pay a courtesy call on Sheikh Abdullah, encamped some four miles out of town, as prelude to a more substantive meeting to be held that evening at the consulate. Leaving Lawrence to his own devices, the two senior men set out on horseback for Abdullah's camp in late morning.

When the trio reconvened at the mission building in early afternoon, however, it was to unpleasant news. A cable had arrived from Cairo announcing that, upon further reflection, the War Committee had chosen to recall both the brigade of British troops and the fleet of airplanes slated for imminent arrival in Rabegh. To add insult to injury, the 10,000 of gold that Storrs had brought with him on the Lama for disburs.e.m.e.nt to Abdullah was to be at least temporarily withheld. After their morning visit to Abdullah, during which Storrs and Wilson were the recipients of lavish Arab hospitality, they quite dreaded the sheikh's impending visit to the consulate.

Accompanied by his elaborately costumed court retainers and slaves, Abdullah arrived shortly after five o'clock. Lawrence's first impression was of a particularly jolly man-perhaps heightened just then by Abdullah's recent success in the city of Taif, where the long-resistant Turkish garrison had at last surrendered-with a touch of the voluptuary; though he was not yet thirty-five, the sheikh's face was already taking on the rounded form of one who enjoyed his pleasures and indulged his appet.i.tes. His jollity didn't last long. Dispensing with the elaborate pleasantries that normally accompanied such meetings, no sooner had Abdullah and his chief lieutenants settled in the consulate reception room than Wilson began reading aloud from the Cairo cable as Storrs translated into Arabic. Abdullah listened with a hard-to-read stoicism.

Once the reading was finished, Abdullah began to plead his case to Storrs, a turn in the conversation the Oriental secretary tried to forestall by explaining he had absolutely no authority in military matters. It was more than a little disingenuous coming from the man who had penned the secret overture to Hussein back in 1914, and for the first time, the Britons in the room were witness to a flash of Abdullah's temper. "Pardon me," he interrupted, "it was your letter and your messages that began this thing with us, and you know it from the beginning, and from before the beginning."

Duly chastened, Storrs and his two countrymen mutely listened as their visitor delivered a long soliloquy on the current grim state of affairs in the Hejaz and the signal role Great Britain had played in bringing it about. "He gave a fairly accurate historical summary of the negotiations," Storrs ruefully noted in his diary, "quoting several times [His Majesty's Government's] promise that we would do everything possible to help the Arabs."

The conversation lasted for a couple of hours, Abdullah outlining all his current difficulties, Storrs and Wilson promising to do all in their limited power to get this latest decision reversed. Toward the meeting's conclusion, the sheikh turned to the task he clearly wished to avoid: calling his father to break the news. The consulate telephone was brought out and a call put through to Emir Hussein's private line, Mecca 1.

To Storrs's surprise, the emir seemed to take the disappointment rather in stride, stating once again his full confidence in his British partners and his faith that all would work out in the end. When at last Abdullah departed from the mission building that evening, with plans made for his return the next morning, he left his British hosts, as Storrs would relate, "in a state of admiration for him and disgust with ourselves."

One person who had spoken very little through that long, tense meeting-indeed, he may not have spoken at all-was T. E. Lawrence. Part of the reason was obvious: he had no official capacity in being there, and for him to offer an unsolicited opinion at such a delicate encounter would have been a shocking breach of protocol. At the same time, this remove allowed Lawrence to spend the time closely studying Abdullah-or as he himself described it, "playing for effect, watching, criticizing him."

If Emir Hussein was the undisputed spiritual leader of the Arab Revolt, Abdullah was its undisputed field marshal; so manifest was this point that among the British military officers and diplomats involved in the Hejaz affair, it had barely even come up for discussion. Abdullah was his father's most trusted son, the emissary he had sent to Cairo in 1914 to sound out the British over his secessionist plans, the military commander who had seen to the capture of Taif, the family representative who sat down and negotiated with their British advisors.

Yet even at this first meeting, Lawrence had his doubts. Despite the somberness of the conversation at the consulate, he suspected in Abdullah "a constant cheerfulness," the mien of an astute politician but not necessarily a sincere one, a man of overwhelming ambition. But there was more to it than that. In poring over the intelligence reports coming out of the Hejaz over the previous four months, Lawrence had tried to a.n.a.lyze why the revolt had settled into dismal stasis after such a promising start. He had concluded that, at its core, what the rebellion lacked was true leaders.h.i.+p, "not intellect, nor judgment, nor political wisdom, but the flame of enthusiasm that would set the desert on fire." What it needed was a prophet, and as that meeting at the consulate had extended, "I became more and more sure that Abdullah was too balanced, too cool, too humourous to be a prophet-especially the armed prophet who, if history be true, succeeded in revolutions."

All of which, had Lawrence voiced these thoughts to his senior colleagues, might have drawn an obvious response: who cares what you think? But Lawrence didn't voice them. Instead, it seems clear that already by the evening of October 16, not yet in Arabia a half day, he had taken it upon himself to calculate a new course for the Arab Revolt, one that would cast him in a central role. That role, as he described it in a moment of profound self-certainty-or breath-catching arrogance, depending on one's perspective-was "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." For any of that to happen, though, would require stealth on Lawrence's part, an ability to keep his own counsel and to quietly look for those openings that might allow him to pursue his agenda. Over the course of that meeting with Abdullah, Lawrence had found his first opening, one he would try to exploit as early as the following morning.

But that long day of October 16, 1916, was not yet over. Before it was, Lawrence was to encounter another personality whose presence loomed large over the Hejaz, one who, by negative example, would soon further clarify the mission Lawrence was creating for himself.

TOWARD THE END of the dinner at the French mission house in Jeddah, Colonel edouard Bremond raised his champagne gla.s.s in toast to his British guests. "I have just heard," he announced, "that my only male relation up till now not killed or wounded in the war has been seriously injured. It is thus my duty and my pride to drink to the Alliance, and to say how much pleasure it gives me to be a.s.sociated with Englishmen."

That poignant moment on the night of October 16 left a deep impression on Ronald Storrs. "The un-French absence of panache in his delivery was very striking. I drank to his cousin's recovery and the success of the French Mission."

Now settled into a somewhat portly middle age, the forty-seven-year- old Bremond was the exemplar of the French imperial soldier, guided by an unwavering belief in both his nation's greatness and the righteousness of its mission civilisatrice, or "civilizing mission," to spread Gallic enlightenment and culture to the world's disadvantaged. For most of his military career, he had served in France's North African possessions, Algeria and then Morocco, and from his experiences battling rebellious tribes had gained the reputation of being an expert in irregular warfare. Promotion came steadily if unspectacularly: supervisor of the Moroccan ports police, deputy head of the French military mission to Morocco, administrator of the city of Rabat.

In the runup to World War I, Bremond had been recalled to France and rushed to the front. As with so many of the French officer cla.s.s in that horrific first month of the war, Bremond's tenure there was pitifully brief, ending when he was shot through the chest while leading his men into battle on the Belgian frontier. After recuperating from his wounds, he was given command of an infantry regiment, the 64th, where for the next two years he watched his military comrades, as well as his male relatives, fall one by one to the Western Front slaughter. A release of sorts presented itself in the summer of 1916 with the outbreak of the Arab Revolt. In deciding to send a small military mission to the region, the French Defense Ministry had looked to Bremond-"a practicing light in native warfare, a success in French Africa"-and seen the perfect man to lead it.

In fact, the colonel was the ideal candidate for reasons that went beyond his long experience in the Muslim world. As with so many of its actions in the Middle Eastern theater of the war, there was a hidden agenda to the French mission to the Hejaz, one that required both cunning and deviousness to execute. By good luck, these traits were very well honed in edouard Bremond.

Encouraging the Arabs to revolt had of course been a British operation from the outset, and one that had made the French leaders.h.i.+p, with their imperial designs on Syria and Lebanon, very nervous when they'd caught wind of it. Their concerns had been eased by the signing of the secret Sykes-Picot agreement, codifying their Middle Eastern claims, but had come rus.h.i.+ng back when the Arab Revolt became a reality. All talk of the Entente Cordiale aside, the French simply didn't trust their British allies to stand by their promises in the region, and with the revolt in the Hejaz, they had now unleashed a revolutionary force that might not be containable even if the British so desired. French anxiety had only deepened when their proposal to send a token military force to the region, a way to protect their future claim and monitor events on the ground, was politely but firmly rebuffed by the British; the situation in the Hejaz was so fluid and delicate, London had argued, that the introduction of another foreign military presence just then could only complicate matters.

So the French pursued a Trojan horse approach instead. The two-hundred-man military unit that sailed out of Ma.r.s.eilles harbor under Colonel Bremond's command in August 1916 was officially t.i.tled the French military mission to Egypt. The British couldn't very well bar such a mission from its closest ally, even if it begged the question of just what the French soldiers intended to do in Egypt. To this, Colonel Bremond had a ready answer: to facilitate the pa.s.sage of Muslim pilgrims from French territories, primarily Morocco and Algeria, seeking to make the hajj to Mecca. The British couldn't very well object to this either, since their army and navy were already providing escort for thousands of Egyptians and Indian Muslims making their own pilgrimage to Mecca.

It had been the last step in this little scheme that even the British had to grudgingly admire for its audacity. Accompanying a group of Moroccan pilgrims to Jeddah in mid-September, Bremond had disembarked, seen to the rental of a suitably impressive building, and announced the arrival of the French military mission to the Hejaz. In short order, he fired off a cable to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, urging the establishment of a permanent diplomatic mission to Hussein's administration. When that request was approved, the French military and diplomatic presence in Arabia was technically equal to that of the British, a fait accompli that London found quite impossible to counteract; after all, Paris could argue, here was the opportunity for the two great allies to jointly plan for the region's future on a basis of equality, a course sure to only broaden their eternal bonds of friends.h.i.+p. This was the situation facing Storrs and Lawrence when they arrived in Jeddah in mid-October.

But Bremond's cunning was not limited to the sh.e.l.l game he had executed in establis.h.i.+ng his Hejaz mission; it extended to the goal of the mission itself. As he expounded during that dinner at the French consulate on October 16, his overt role in the Hejaz was to show French support for the Arab Revolt, and to ascertain how France might be able to a.s.sist it. His covert role, however, was to try to limit the scope of that revolt, to keep it and its aspirations for an Arab nation well away from those Arab lands that France coveted in the postwar era. As for how that might be done, Bremond had a neat, if supremely cynical, plan.

Above all else, he explained to his British guests that night, the Arabs must not be allowed to take Medina. So long as the Turkish garrison there held out, and so long as the Arabs concentrated their blood and treasure on seizing it, the rebellion would remain safely bottled up in the Hejaz. Should Medina fall, he warned, then the Arabs would naturally turn their attention to the north, to liberating from the Turkish yoke their Arab brethren in Palestine and Syria and Iraq, a campaign that would inevitably conflict with British and French imperial designs in the region.

It was cold-blooded perhaps, but a strategy quite brilliant in its simplicity: while trying to help a foreign rebellion succeed was always an iffy proposition, arranging for it to not succeed was infinitely easier.

Yet at that dinner at the French consulate, Colonel Bremond was laboring under at least two great misconceptions. The first was that this element of connivance-of lending support to the Arab Revolt as a means to hobble it-was actually necessary. If Bremond had known of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, with its promise of a French Syria and Lebanon, he might have been far more sanguine over the future course of the Arab Revolt. But Sykes-Picot was known to only a very small handful of French government officials, and this group did not include those midlevel military and foreign ministry bureaucrats tasked to defend France's claims in the Middle East. Incredibly, this information had also been withheld from the man sent to Arabia to serve as the frontline guardian of those claims.

Bremond's second misconception was in a.s.suming that, as he held forth to his British guests that evening, he was among friends-or at least, like-minded imperialists. He was not, and he most especially was not of the young British captain who sat at the dining table and barely spoke. As Bremond was soon to discover, in T. E. Lawrence he had a very formidable opponent. What's more, advantage had just pa.s.sed to Lawrence. At the French consulate, Bremond had laid his hand bare; Lawrence had revealed nothing.

PRECEDED BY A phalanx of slaves, Abdullah rode on a white mare into the courtyard of the British consulate at about ten o'clock the following morning. He was more somber than the day before, and once settled into the consulate reception room, he explained why. He had just received a cable from his brother Faisal at his mountain encampment north of Rabegh reporting that two Turkish warplanes had bombed his camp the previous afternoon; while inflicting little damage, they had sown terror among the tribesmen, most of whom had never seen such machines before. The news was especially pointed, considering the attack came on the same day the British had canceled plans to send their own fleet of airplanes to Arabia.

This drew a response from Lawrence, who suggested that this Turkish show of force shouldn't be cause for much alarm. "Very few Turkish airplanes last more than four or five days," he breezily explained.

It was probably with this comment that Abdullah truly took notice of Lawrence-a mere background presence the previous day-for the first time. He soon had reason to take even greater notice when the conversation turned to a discussion on the location of various Turkish forces around the Middle East. "As Syrian, Circa.s.sian, Anatolian, Mesopotamian names came up," Ronald Storrs recalled, "Lawrence at once stated exactly which [Turkish] unit was in each position, until Abdullah turned to me in amazement: 'Is this man G.o.d, to know everything?' "

In his memoirs, Storrs attributed his friend's remarkable performance that morning to happy coincidence stemming from Lawrence's labors in the Cairo mapmaking room. Perhaps, or perhaps Lawrence was merely bluffing. Either way, the effect was the same, and it provided Lawrence with the platform to roll out his scheme.

The chief difficulty the British faced in a.s.sisting the Arab Revolt, he explained to Abdullah, was a lack of reliable information on what was actually taking place on the ground. What was needed was an objective observer, one who could gain the ear of senior British war planners, to provide a comprehensive report on the situation, both on the problems that seemed to be plaguing the supply pipeline in the port town of Rabegh and on the logistical needs of Faisal's forces in the mountains to the north. Since time was clearly of the essence, Lawrence put himself forth as the man who might carry out this mission.

It was an innocuous enough proposal, and one Abdullah immediately agreed to, suggesting that once Lawrence was in Rabegh, he would arrange for Faisal to come down from the mountains to meet with him. To this, Lawrence politely demurred. He needed to appraise the situation inland for himself, which meant he needed to go to Faisal, not the other way around. Given the stricture against non-Muslims traveling to the interior, it was a bold request. Even Cyril Wilson, who had met Faisal twice and whom Emir Hussein greatly respected, had only been permitted to step down at port towns and wait for Faisal's appearance.

With Storrs joining in the lobbying effort, Abdullah was gradually won over to the idea-no doubt the current tenuousness of the Arab position had a loosening effect-but the ultimate decision rested with the more formidable Hussein. As Abdullah expected, his father was extremely ambivalent to the plan when he was called on the Mecca trunk line, spurring Storrs to take command of the telephone receiver.

"Storrs in full blast was a delight to listen to in the mere matter of Arabic speech," Lawrence would recall, "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 [he] also had his way."

But it was a qualified victory. The most Hussein would allow was for Lawrence to put in at Rabegh, and there to meet with his eldest son, Ali; if Ali "thought fit," he would then arrange Lawrence's onward journey to meet Faisal. It was not at all hard to see how this was going to end up. Ali had a reputation for caution, and for the cautious, the default answer is always no. Storrs and Lawrence resolved to push the matter when Abdullah returned to the British consulate for dinner that evening.

At that dinner, Storrs and Lawrence urged Abdullah to write formal letters of introduction to Ali and Faisal, figuring this would greatly enhance the odds of Lawrence being given permission to travel inland. This Abdullah was initially very reluctant to do, but, gaining his father's approval over the telephone line, Lawrence recounted, Abdullah finally penned "direct written instructions to Ali to mount me as well and as quickly as possible, and convey me, by sure hand, to Faisal's camp."

Early on the morning of October 19, HMS Lama put into Rabegh harbor. For the rest of his life, an image would stick in Ronald Storrs's mind of Lawrence standing on the pier and waving goodbye as Storrs's s.h.i.+p turned and made for Egypt. Lawrence's Arabian adventure had begun.

LAWRENCE'S HUNCH ABOUT Ali proved absolutely correct; the eldest Hussein son was staggered when he was handed the letter from Abdullah dictating their father's permission for the young British army captain to travel inland. However, with the fealty with which all the Hussein sons showed their father, Ali saw no choice but to acquiesce, and he set about arranging Lawrence's journey.

Situated at the edge of a broad desert plain, the nondescript little port of Rabegh seemed an unlikely spot to hold anyone's attention for very long, let alone to be the strategic linchpin in the war for control of the Arabian Peninsula. Yet, situated midway between Mecca and Medina, Rabegh was a crucial way station on the "pilgrims' road"-little more than a camel track marked by stone cairns-that linked those two holy cities, which meant it stood squarely in the path of any Turkish army moving south to retake Mecca. Rabegh was also the chief transs.h.i.+pment point for British supplies and weaponry coming down from Egypt to be distributed to the rebels fighting inland-or not distributed, merely vanis.h.i.+ng somewhere en route, as more often seemed to be the case.

If Rabegh was not the most appealing place, the two and a half days Lawrence spent there did provide him with the chance to meet two more of Emir Hussein's sons, and to submit them to the same sort of character study he had performed on Abdullah in Jeddah.

By coincidence, Zeid, the youngest, had recently arrived to help Ali sort out the supply-line problems. A half brother to Hussein's other three sons, Zeid was a handsome youth of twenty, who had inherited the pale complexion and softer features of his Turkish mother. Although he was clearly quite intelligent, both his youth and non-Arab appearance would have made him an unlikely rebel commander even if he possessed leaders.h.i.+p traits, which he did not. "Is fond of riding about and playing tricks," Lawrence noted. "Humorous in outlook, and perhaps a little better balanced, because less intense, than his brothers. Shy."

Despite the strained circ.u.mstances of their first meeting, Lawrence took a quick liking to Ali. "His manner was dignified and admirable, but direct," he wrote, "and he struck me as a pleasant gentleman, conscientious." But there was a forlorn, tired air to Hussein's eldest son, his skin sallow, his mouth "sad and drooping," that made him seem far older than his thirty-seven years. Without apparent ambition for himself, Lawrence observed, Ali also seemed to fall under the sway of whatever more dynamic personality happened to be nearby, hardly the hallmark of a natural leader. Still, Lawrence much preferred Ali to Abdullah, noting that "if Faisal should turn out to be no prophet, the revolt would make s.h.i.+ft well enough with Ali for its head." Perhaps, but it was a make-do a.s.sessment that considerably raised the stakes for Lawrence's meeting with Faisal.

He set out for that meeting on the night of October 21. Indicative of Ali's abiding concern over the journey-part of the hundred-mile trek would be through areas controlled by tribes hostile to the revolt-were the elaborate precautions he'd taken, keeping news of Lawrence's departure and destination secret from even his closest household slaves. To serve as Lawrence's guides, he had chosen two of his most trusted lieutenants, a father and son who, by the unwritten law of the Arabian tribes, were expected to lay down their lives to protect their charge. Ali further directed the three men to avoid all settlements along the route and to travel at night as much as possible, even that Lawrence wear a headdress over his army uniform so as to cast a sufficiently Arab-looking silhouette in the moonlight.

The potential for danger notwithstanding, very soon after setting out Lawrence's preoccupation turned to the more mundane, the grinding physical discomfort of riding a camel again after two years sitting behind a desk at the Savoy Hotel. Since its p.r.o.nounced and narrow spine lies just below the skin, riding a camel is a wholly different experience from riding a horse, more akin to sitting atop a swaying metal rod. Even the best Bedouin saddle-little more than a wood-and-leather frame covered in blankets-can only slightly dull the pain for the green rider. Most such riders can rarely withstand the suffering for more than two or three hours without a break, but Lawrence was to have no such luxury on this journey; instead, what lay before him was an ordeal of some thirty hours in the saddle broken only by two short breaks. He spurred himself on by summoning the extraordinary endurance he had shown in the past-on his bicycle tours of France, on his twelve-hundred-mile hike through Syria-and by holding the thought that at the other end awaited the last of the Hussein brothers, the man who might prove to be his "prophet" of war.

Despite his discomfort-or maybe as a way to distract from it-Lawrence made a careful study of the terrain they were crossing, jotting down notes in his small army-issue notebook as he rode. He was traversing a land only a handful of outsiders had ever glimpsed, one steeped in a desert culture little changed in millennia, but with just enough similarities to the Syria he knew so well as to be thoroughly disorienting. In Syria he had made a hobby of sorting out the complicated clan and tribal structures, the complex rules that governed their interaction, but in Arabia all those rules were far more layered, far more rigidly upheld.

"Each hill and valley in it had a man who was its acknowledged owner," he wrote, "and [who] would quickly a.s.sert 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.... 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."

In Syria, the price for transgression was most often ostracism, perhaps the handing over of a sheep in fine; in the sere and harsh landscape of Arabia, it was death.

But if still the amateur anthropologist, Lawrence was also taking note of the topography of the Hejaz through the eyes of a military man: where sources of water might be found, the trails an army might navigate to best advantage. In this way, he happened upon a glaring hole in his own army's contingency plans.

In preparing for the defense of Rabegh-which by definition also meant the defense of Mecca-British officers advising the rebels had mapped out the Turks' most likely approaches, ones predicated on the existence of trails and the supply of water, and overseen the building of outlying guardposts accordingly. Yet on his journey to Faisal's camp, Lawrence came upon two seasonal watercourses that didn't appear on any British maps, and that would allow an attacking army to either fall on Rabegh from an unforeseen direction or to sidestep the port town completely on its way to Mecca. How had the British advisors, who had now been in Rabegh for three months, remained ignorant of these watercourses, and why had the local Arabs, who surely knew of them, not raised the alarm? Quite simply, because quarantined as they were on the sh.o.r.eline, the British hadn't been aware enough of their surroundings to formulate the question, and without the question, the Arabs hadn't been aware enough of British concerns to offer the information. To Lawrence, it underscored both the difficulty in trying to marry two such very different cultures for the purpose of making war, and the potential for disaster in Hussein's stricture against nonbelievers traveling inland; no matter how many British troops were brought over, so long as they were isolated on the coast, in their ability to gauge danger they might as well be in blindfolds.

In the early afternoon of October 23, Lawrence's party rounded a wall of high stone cliffs to suddenly find themselves in the verdant valley of Wadi Safra, the refuge for Faisal's rebel army that had so recently been humbled outside Medina. As they ascended toward the headwaters, Lawrence began to see small encampments of armed men scattered among the hillside villages, camps that steadily grew in size and proliferation until they seemed to fill most every level stretch of land.

At last the party entered Hamra, a village of about one hundred homes, and drew up before a long, low house where a sword-wielding slave stood guard. Dismounting from his camel, Lawrence was admitted into the inner courtyard to see the profile of a man standing in the far doorway. "[He] looked very tall and pillar-like," he wrote, "very slender, in his long white silk robes and his brown headcloth bound with a brilliant scarlet and gold cord. His eyelids were drooped, and his black beard and colorless face were like a mask against the strange, still watchfulness of his body."

It was Faisal ibn Hussein. As Lawrence would later write in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, "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."

MAYBE, BUT IN actual fact, their initial meeting did not go well. Ushered into the home, Lawrence joined Faisal and a dozen or so other men, chieftains of various tribes that had joined the revolt, in a dimly lit room covered with carpets. As did his brothers, Faisal possessed a courtly graciousness, and he thanked Lawrence for making the long and difficult journey to visit him. This preamble soon gave way, though, to a more somber discussion of his recent string of military setbacks at the hands of the Turks.

Of Hussein's sons, Faisal and his followers had borne the greatest amount of fighting since the start of the revolt, and had done so while receiving the least in the way of supplies and funds. Most recently, he explained to his visitor, his men had been on the verge of a great victory at Bir Abbas, on Medina's outskirts. Instead, for lack of artillery to counteract that brought to bear by the Turks, his army had foundered and then been scattered. The remnants of that army-many had peeled away and returned to their homes-were now encamped there with him in the mountain safeness of Hamra, awaiting the Turks' next move. That was how things stood. Properly supplied and armed, Faisal contended, his men were capable of anything, but if the current situation persisted, where they had to beg the British for every ounce of materiel-most of which never reached the front lines anyway-then the future course of the uprising was already written. When the Turks came out of their stronghold in Medina and marched for the coast, a march that now seemed imminent, it would leave Faisal with the choice of either being stranded in the mountains or beating a retreat back toward Mecca. The first option would mean slow annihilation, the second rapid disintegration, for just as had occurred after Bir Abbas, many of his followers would refuse to flee so far away from their tribal areas-they would just go home.

Even as he listened, Lawrence intently studied Faisal, looking for clues to both his personality and the nature of the hold he had over the other men crowded into the room. "He was a man of moods," he noted, "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.... 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."

Maybe it was also Faisal's exhaustion that caused him to speak far more bluntly than his brothers had of the element of distrust that lay at the core of the Arabs' relations.h.i.+p with Britain, a distrust reflected in everything from Hussein's tortuous two-year negotiation with Storrs and McMahon to the restricting of British advisors to the coast. Since history clearly showed the British didn't help others out of the goodness of their heart, Faisal asked, just what was it they wanted of the Hejaz?

As many other British officers had done with other members of Hussein's Hashemite clan, in the dimly lit home in Hamra, Lawrence patiently rea.s.sured Faisal that the British had absolutely no territorial interests in the Hejaz. That a.s.surance lost some of its l.u.s.ter, Faisal pointed out, when it was recalled that the British had said precisely the same thing about the Sudan before grabbing it.

Their somewhat p.r.i.c.kly conversation extended through dinner, then started up again at 6:30 the next morning when Faisal showed up at Lawrence's tent. In these talks, Lawrence found Hussein's third son to be "most unreasonable," and yet there was something about the pa.s.sion with which he spoke, the hard determination behind it, that Lawrence found profoundly compelling. It was a pa.s.sion he'd found lacking in both Abdullah or Ali, and it fueled his conviction that in Faisal he had found his leader.

That conviction was strengthened when Lawrence spent several hours that day wandering among the rebel encampments, falling into conversation with whoever crossed his path. One of the first things that struck him was the range of tribes they represented. In the ever-fractious world of Arabia, rare was the man who could unite even the various tribes and clans in his immediate area, but here in Wadi Safra were thousands of men representing nearly every tribal group across the breadth of the western Hejaz, some a full two weeks' journey away from their homelands. Even more remarkable, this was an army that had been put to flight by the Turks just a week earlier, and yet their morale and confidence in ultimate victory seemed utterly unshaken. The man who had molded that unity and spurred that confidence was Faisal.

That evening, having been in Wadi Safra for only slightly more than twenty-four hours, Lawrence stopped by Faisal's headquarters to say goodbye. Their parting conversation was more relaxed than those of earlier, with Faisal thanking Lawrence for coming and Lawrence holding out the vague hope that perhaps his trip would prove of some benefit. With that, he mounted a new camel and, with a squad of fourteen warriors as bodyguards, made for the nearest rebel-held Red Sea port, the town of Yenbo, where a British s.h.i.+p might collect him for his return to Egypt. He was anxious to get there, for he was now firmly convinced that in Faisal ibn Hussein the revolt had found its prophet. "It was all and more than we had hoped for," he wrote, "much more than our halting course deserved. The aim of my trip was fulfilled."

Chapter 9.

The Man Who Would Be Kingmaker [Faisal] is hot tempered, proud and impatient, sometimes unreasonable and runs off easily at tangents. Possesses far more personal magnetism and life than his brothers, but less prudence. Obviously very clever, perhaps not over scrupulous ... Had he been brought up the wrong way might have become a barrack yard officer. A popular idol, and ambitious; full of dreams, and the capacity to realize them.

T. E. LAWRENCE ON FAISAL IBN HUSSEIN, OCTOBER 30, 1916.

Doggedness and good luck had made Lawrence's visit to the Hejaz an extraordinarily successful one. In a mere ten days, he had met all four of Emir Hussein's sons, as well as the princ.i.p.al Allied envoys in Jeddah. He had also seen firsthand the British efforts at establis.h.i.+ng a supply line for the rebels at Rabegh, and been the first outsider to journey inland for a look at the actual battlefront. Now, as he rode into Yenbo on the morning of October 26, 1916, he was anxious to get back to Cairo to report on his findings.

In that dusty little port town, however, his fortunes suddenly flagged. A British wars.h.i.+p had been scheduled to make a Yenbo port of call, but the appointed day came and went with no sign of it. With no choice but to wait-for a total of five days, it would turn out-Lawrence took up quarters in a modest three-story house overlooking the tiny waterfront, the home of Faisal's local liaison officer, and there set to work writing up the impressions of his journey. In his usual crabbed hand, and with only a blue fountain pen and some sc.r.a.p paper by way of supplies, over the next five days he would put some seventeen thousand words to paper.

It was also in that house in Yenbo where the dueling legends of T. E. Lawrence were to be born. To his lionizers, Lawrence's acute grasp of the situation on the ground in Arabia, combined with his brilliance at conveying that understanding into words, was about to make him a man born to the hour, a prime example of the phenomenon in which a particular kind of genius is finally joined to the circ.u.mstances he has spent his entire life working toward. To his detractors, what was about to happen could be largely, even wholly, attributed to random chance, that the myriad small events which were to transpire over the next three weeks and so improbably turn to Lawrence's advantage-the strange coincidences, the timing and mistiming of messages, the byzantine maneuverings by generals and statesmen-were beyond any prediction. If all these factors were tossed into some giant cosmic hopper, so this narrative goes, it never would have played out in quite the same sequence again.

The specifics of Lawrence's resume that October would actually appear to provide fodder for the latter version of the legend. At Yenbo, he was a twenty-eight-year-old army captain without a single day of military training; at that time, policy in Arabia was being debated at the highest levels of the British military and political leaders.h.i.+p. True, he was the first British officer to glimpse the rebel fighters in the field, but that glimpse had lasted all of twenty-six hours and essentially consisted of watching them lounge about a valley encampment, hardly the basis for an authoritative a.n.a.lysis. Nor were most of his observations truly unique; among the handful of British military officers who had preceded him to the Hejaz, nearly all had noted the completely ad hoc nature of the Arab "army," its lack of anything approaching conventional military discipline, even its abject terror of enemy artillery and airplanes.

But of course, Lawrence hadn't merely his brief sojourn to Faisal's camp to draw on, but the years he had spent immersing himself in Arab culture in Carchemish. From this he'd gained a profound appreciation for how clan and tribal alliances worked, how that structure might play out on the battlefield, and how unusual it was to find a leader capable of forging a coalition of tribes for anything more than a very short-term goal. In addition, starting as a young boy and continuing through his years at Oxford, Lawrence had obsessively focused on one very particular field of scholars.h.i.+p-medieval military history-and warfare in early-twentieth-century Arabia bore striking similarities to that in fourteenth-century Europe. These similarities extended from how a fighting force was recruited, to its leaders.h.i.+p structure-trade out sheikhs and emirs for lords and thanes and princes-to how that fighting force maneuvered in the field. In 1916 Hejaz, much like 1356 France, an army on the move was wholly dependent on satisfying its most elemental needs-water, the availability of draft animals, forage-and this dictated where it went, whom it fought, and when. Lawrence, with a knowledge of medieval military strategies surpa.s.sed by but a small handful of people alive, found many of the features of the Arabian battlefield instantly recognizable, and certainly far more familiar than to a professionally trained officer steeped in Napoleonic or even current Western Front precepts.

With this cultural and scholarly grounding, Lawrence immediately saw the utter futility of trying to transform the Arab rebel fighting force into something it was not, and never would be-namely, a conventional European-style army. The only way forward, he argued in the reports he penned in Yenbo, was for the British to accept the Arab way of war, and to adapt their strategies and expectations accordingly.

But even this was not terribly controversial or original as far as it went-after all, even the most hidebound military officer recognizes the need to adjust to the men and materiel at his disposal-but from his brief time in the Hejaz, Lawrence had come to two specific conclusions that were much more so.

In light of the woeful lack of military success since the early days of the Arab Revolt, there was a growing consensus in both London and Cairo that a sizable British force would have to be dispatched to the Hejaz to bolster the rebel forces; the most common figure bandied about was a brigade, or at least three thousand soldiers. In October, Emir Hussein continued to vacillate about this idea, worried that such an "infidel" presence in the Muslim holy land would undermine his standing with the tribes currently joined to him. From his own travels, and especially from the wariness he had encountered in Faisal's camp, Lawrence concluded that Hussein's apprehensions were absolutely valid; while a small group of European advisors and trainers setting up shop on the coastline would be "joyously welcomed," he wrote, any larger force was likely to be resented and play into Turkish propaganda about Christian Crusaders. By arguing for this minimal presence, Lawrence was placing himself against the majority opinion of the British military command staff, including that held by the two British officers who'd spent the most time in the Hejaz, Lt. Colonel Cyril Wilson and his deputy, Alfred Parker.

Even more potentially contentious was Lawrence's notion that the true "prophet" of the revolt was the soft-spoken and austere Faisal. Going back to even before the war, British officials had regarded the gregarious and dynamic Abdullah as their chief ally in the Hejaz, the son in closest counsel to the mercurial Hussein, and nothing since the revolt's outbreak had changed that view. To the contrary, it was to Abdullah that those officials continued to turn in hopes of divining what the old man might be thinking, and in charting the next stage in the fighting. By contrast, prior to Lawrence, the only British officials to have met Faisal were Wilson and Parker, and then to rather thin conclusion; if liking Faisal on a personal level, Wilson had sensed in the emir's third son "a man who can't stand the racket" of combat-essentially, a coward-an estimation he had conveyed to the British leaders.h.i.+p. When it came to promoting Faisal as the revolt's real leader, Lawrence const.i.tuted a minority of precisely one.

And so, against the very long odds on both these points, just how did Lawrence eventually win out? A case of genius not to be denied, or sheer dumb luck?

What the purveyors of both dueling legends tend to overlook is that, already at Yenbo, Lawrence had a formidable, if rather unglamorous, weapon in his a.r.s.enal. From his position at the inner circle of the military intelligence apparatus in Cairo, he possessed an intimate grasp of the British military and political power structure deciding policy in Arabia. But "structure" is far too charitable a word. In fact, it was a bureaucratic quagmire, a maze of overlapping ministries and competing agendas and feuding personalities. From his reading at the Savoy Hotel-and virtually nothing was so cla.s.sified as to be beyond his purview-Lawrence knew who all the princ.i.p.al players were in this mora.s.s, the opinions they held, and, perhaps most important, who their rivals were. Along with writing up his reports, the five-day wait in Yenbo gave him time to contemplate the mind-numbingly complex political chessboard that lay before him, and to devise a strategy whereby he might play off the competing factions and see his ideas win out.

He would be a.s.sisted in this by something else often overlooked: the nature of communications at the time. In some spheres, this was fantastically advanced from just decades earlier, in others still quite primitive. In 1916, the mimeograph machine could make hundreds, even thousands of copies of an important doc.u.ment; for most everything else, there was the century-old technology of carbon paper. Via the wireless telegraph, a message could be sent from London to Buenos Aires in a matter of minutes, while delivering that same message to someone just ten miles away in a place like Arabia required the dispatch of a courier on foot or horseback. Lawrence would prove very adept at using both the advances and deficiencies in communications to his advantage, repeatedly breaching protocol to get messages to his allies quickly, conveniently failing to receive undesired orders-"garbled transmission" was a favorite excuse-until it was too late and the matter decided. Joined to a certain ruthless streak, it all enabled T. E. Lawrence to emerge as a kind of exemplar of the bureaucratic infighter, with a prowess that even the most devious palace intriguer or tenure-track college professor might envy.

Over the next three weeks, Lawrence would be employed as point man-hatchet man might be a more apt term-by a variety of British officials seeking to promote their agendas over those of their rivals. In that role, the twenty-eight-year-old captain would adroitly work all sides of the street, allowing him to administer a brutal blow to French designs in the region, undermine an immensely powerful British official, and help catalyze a fundamental s.h.i.+ft in British policy in Arabia. In the process, he would also alter the course of the Arab Revolt, and his own role within it.

It was an ascendancy that got off to a shaky start, however. On October 31, HMS Suva, under the command of a career naval officer named William "Ginger" Boyle, so nicknamed for his red hair, put in to Yenbo to finally free Lawrence from his enforced Arabian interlude.

"I had heard of a Captain Lawrence being on the coast," Boyle would recall in his memoirs. "I had a.s.sumed he was one of the military officers sent over and was a little astonished when a small, untidily dressed and most unmilitary figure strolled up to me on board ... hands in pockets and so without a salute." Noticing that Lawrence had three captain stars on one shoulder strap but inexplicably none on the other, the no-nonsense Boyle refused even to acknowledge his pa.s.senger and instead pointed him over to his first lieutenant; the s.h.i.+p captain was gratified when the lieutenant roundly upbraided Lawrence for his lack of manners.

In his own recollection of that meeting, Lawrence conceded his failure to make a good first impression on Ginger Boyle but was more inclined to attribute the problem to genetics. "Red-haired men," he pointed out, "are seldom patient."

BY ALL ACCOUNTS, edouard Bremond had taken little notice of the quiet British army captain who attended his dinner at the French mission on October 16. There was little reason he should have. The French colonel's princ.i.p.al guests that evening had been his British counterpart in Jeddah, Cyril Wilson, and the visiting Oriental secretary for Egypt, Ronald Storrs, a gregarious and witty table companion. By contrast, Captain Lawrence had been so slight in stature and so youthful in face that, in his ill-fitting uniform, he might easily have been mistaken for an adolescent playing at soldier. Bremond had ample reason to revisit that a.s.sessment when Lawrence returned to the French mission dining hall at the beginning of November. At that dinner, the una.s.suming young officer of three weeks before was loquacious, even commandeering of the conversation, and Bremond was aghast at what he was saying.

When HMS Suva had turned into Yenbo bay on October 31, Lawrence had a.s.sumed he would soon be on his way back to Cairo. Instead, Cyril Wilson's deputy in the Hejaz, Colonel Alfred Parker, had come up on the Suva to hear firsthand what Lawrence had found at Faisal's camp. Impressed by his insights, Parker had suggested that Lawrence first make for Khartoum in order to confer with Reginald Wingate, the governor-general of the Sudan and one of the most important British officials involved in Arabian affairs. As a result, the Suva had carried Lawrence two hundred miles back down the coast to Jeddah, where a second s.h.i.+p was readied to take him on the short hop across the Red Sea to the Sudan. Testament to the sudden interest in his mission, this second s.h.i.+p, HMS Euryalus, was the flags.h.i.+p of the Red Sea fleet and under the personal direction of the fleet commander, Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss.

Hearing of all this, Colonel Bremond was also keen to learn what the young army captain had observed in Faisal's camp and, perhaps even more, just what he intended to tell Reginald Wingate. This had prompted his invitation to Lawrence and Wemyss to be his dinner guests in Jeddah. At that gathering, it soon became clear that most every opinion Captain Lawrence had formed ran directly counter to what the French colonel was trying to achieve in Arabia.

Since setting up shop in Jeddah in early September, Bremond had lobbied for a greatly expanded Allied military presence in the Hejaz. Certainly part of his argument had root in his very low opinion of the fighting capability of Hussein's rebels. Time and again, he had proposed that the two hundred French technical advisors who were under his command and currently sitting idle in Egypt be brought down to Rabegh, where they might start transforming the Arabs into a credible fighting force. Of course, such a small force would be completely vulnerable in the event of a Turkish attack on that port town, Bremond argued, so he further proposed that a sizable contingent of British soldiers-at least a brigade, perhaps two-be brought from Egypt to secure the area and provide protection. If the French colonel had his way, the Western military presence in the Hejaz would be expanded from a tiny handful of men-himself, Wilson, and Parker, the few British logistics officers scattered along the sh.o.r.eline-to anywhere between three thousand and ten thousand.

Left unspoken in this proposition was how it neatly dovetailed with France's-or at least Colonel Bremond's-hidden agenda. With a large force of Allied troops on the ground, it would be that much easier to monitor and control events, and to prevent the Arab Revolt from spreading north into Syria. Even better, with an absolutely minimal French investment, its two hundred soldiers alongside Britain's thousands, France would achieve a physical military presence in the Middle East, and further stake its claim to being a joint and equal partner with Britain in the region.

Even without grasping Bremond's ulterior motives, the commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in Cairo, General Archibald Murray, had given the idea a frosty reception. Tasked to launch an offensive into southern Palestine on the far side of the Sinai Peninsula, and with his army already being periodically poached by Western Front commanders looking for fresh bodies to fling against the Germans in France, Murray was adamantly opposed to parting with any more of his men for the "sideshow" in Arabia.