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 a**urances 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 pa** 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 d**h 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 pa**ion 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 Can*l. 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.