Our
check in Mesopotamia was a disappointment to us; but McMahon continued
his negotiations with Mecca, and finally brought them to success despite
the evacuation of Gallipoli, the surrender of Kut, and the generally
unfortunate aspect of the war at the moment. Few people, even of those
who knew all the negotiations, had really believed that the Sherif would
fight; consequently his eventual rebellion and opening of his coast to
our ships and help took us and them by surprise.
We found our difficulties then only beginning. The
credit of the new factor was to McMahon and Clayton: professional
jealousies immediately raised their heads. Sir Archibald Murray, the
General in Egypt, wanted, naturally enough, no competitors and no
competing campaigns in his sphere. He disliked the civil power, which
had so long kept the peace between himself and General Maxwell. He could
not be entrusted with the Arabian affair; for neither he nor his staff
had the ethnological competence needed to deal with so curious a
problem. On the other hand, he could make the spectacle of the High
Commission running a private war sufficiently ridiculous. His was a very
nervous mind, fanciful and essentially competitive. When confronted with
what he considered a rival show, he bent his very considerable powers to
crab it.
He found help in his Chief of Staff, General Lynden
Bell, a red soldier, with an instinctive shuddering away from
politicians, and a conscientiously assumed heartiness. His military
conception of the loyalties of his office involved him in a
chameleon-like attempt to imitate the frailties as well as virtues of
his chief. Two of the General Staff officers followed their leaders full
cry; and so the unfortunate McMahon found himself deprived of Army help
and reduced to waging his war in Arabia with the assistance of his
Foreign Office Attachés. Even these proved not all quite loyal to him.
Some appeared to resent a war which allowed
outsiders to thrust into their business. Also their training in
suppression, by which alone the daily trivialities of diplomacy were
made to look like man's work, had so sunk into them that when the more
important thing arrived, they made it trivial. Their feebleness of tone,
and niggling dishonesties to one another, angered the military to
disgust; and were bad for us, too, since they patently let down the High Commissioner, whose
boots the Grahams were not good enough to clean.
Wingate, who had complete confidence in his own
grasp of the situation in the Middle East, foresaw credit and great
profit for the country in the Arab development; but as criticism slowly
beat up against McMahon he dissociated himself from him, and London
began to hint that better use might be made by an experienced hand of so
subtle and involved a skein.
However it was, things in the Hejaz went from bad
to worse. No proper liaison was provided for the Arab forces in the
field, no military information was given the Sherifs, no tactical advice
or strategy was suggested, no attempt made to find out the local
conditions and adapt existing Allied resources in material to suit their
needs. The French Military Mission (which Clayton's prudence had
suggested be sent to Hejaz to soothe our very suspicious allies by
taking them behind the scenes and giving them a purpose there), was
permitted to carry on an elaborate intrigue against Sherif Hussein in
his towns of Jidda and Mecca, and to propose to him and to the British
authorities measures that must have ruined his cause in the eyes of all
Moslems. Wingate, now in military control of our co-operation with the
Sherif, was induced to land some foreign troops at Rabegh, half-way
between Medina and Mecca, for the defence of Mecca and to hold up the
further advance of the reinvigorated Turks from Medina. McMahon, in the
multitude of counsellors, became confused, and gave a handle to Murray
to cry out against his inconsistencies. The Arab Revolt became
discredited; and Staff Officers in Egypt gleefully prophesied to us its
near failure and the stretching of Sherif Hussein's neck on a Turkish
scaffold.
My private position was not easy. As Staff Captain
under Clayton in Sir Archibald Murray's Intelligence Section, I was
charged with the 'distribution' of the Turkish Army and the preparation
of maps. By natural inclination I had added to them the invention of the
Arab Bulletin, a secret weekly record of Middle-Eastern politics; and of
necessity Clayton came more and more to need me in the military wing of
the Arab Bureau, the tiny intelligence and war staff for foreign
affairs, which he was now organizing for McMahon. Eventually Clayton was
driven out of the General Staff; and Colonel Holdich, Murray's
intelligence officer at Ismailia, took his place in command of us. His
first intention was to retain my services; and, since he clearly did not
need me, I interpreted
this, not without some friendly evidence, as a method of keeping me away
from the Arab affair. I decided that I must escape at once, if ever. A
straight request was refused; so I took to stratagems. I became, on the
telephone (G.H.Q. were at Ismailia, and I in Cairo) quite intolerable to
the Staff on the Canal. I took every opportunity to rub into them their
comparative ignorance and inefficiency in the department of intelligence
(not difficult!) and irritated them yet further by literary airs,
correcting Shavian split infinitives and tautologies in their reports.
In a few days they were bubbling over on my
account, and at last determined to endure me no longer. I took this
strategic opportunity to ask for ten days' leave, saying that Storrs was
going down to Jidda on business with the Grand Sherif, and that I would
like a holiday and joyride in the Red Sea with him. They did not love
Storrs, and were glad to get rid of me for the moment. So they agreed at
once, and began to prepare against my return some official shelf for me.
Needless to say, I had no intention of giving them such a chance; for,
while very ready to hire my body out on petty service, I hesitated to
throw my mind frivolously away. So I went to Clayton and confessed my
affairs; and he arranged for the Residency to make telegraphic
application to the Foreign Office for my transfer to the Arab Bureau.
The Foreign Office would treat directly with the War Office; and the
Egypt command would not hear of it, till all was ended.
Storrs and I then marched off together, happily. In
the East they swore that by three sides was the decent way across a
square; and my trick to escape was in this sense oriental. But I
justified myself by my confidence in the final success of the Arab
Revolt if properly advised. I had been a mover in its beginning; my
hopes lay in it. The fatalistic subordination of a professional soldier
(intrigue being unknown in the British army) would have made a proper
officer sit down and watch his plan of campaign wrecked by men who
thought nothing of it, and to whose spirit it made no appeal. Non
nobis, Domine.
