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 homes 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 organise 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
Feisal suggested that he move to Wadi Ais,
the
a
historic valley of springs and palm-villages flowing through the
impregnable Juheina
hills from behind Rudhwa eastward to the Hamdh valley near Hedia. It
which 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.
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 Homs, 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 guard-ship – 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
Sherif's 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 Um 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
started 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, business-like 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 peace-able
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 time-table 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
he 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.
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 life
perverse, and so a nasty colleague.
Hassan Sharaf, the headquarters' doctor, a noble
man who had put not merely his life, 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 rain-water. 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 fore-leg. 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 civilised 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 rightness. 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 Ali 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 Yusuf'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 tent-cloth, 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 fertilisation 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 foot-hills; 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
our M.I. 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.
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. Today 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 north-ward 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 life 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 i'
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 out-crop 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.
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 Rifada 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 fore-runner 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
He
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 like
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
local people, 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 Tewfik 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 out-numbered 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.
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
by the navy and its landing parties.
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.
