Suddenly
Feisal asked me if I would wear Arab clothes like his own while in the
camp. I should find it better for my own part, since it was a
comfortable dress in which to live Arab-fashion as we must do. Besides,
the tribesmen would then understand how to take me. The only wearers of
khaki in their experience had been Turkish officers, before whom they
took up an instinctive defence. If I wore Meccan clothes, they would
behave to me as though I were really one of the leaders; and I might
slip in and out of Feisal's tent without making a sensation which he had
to explain away each time to strangers.
I agreed at once, very gladly; for army uniform was
abominable when camel-riding or when sitting about on the ground; and
the Arab things, which I had learned to manage before the war, were
cleaner and more decent in the desert. Hejris was pleased, too, and
exercised his fancy in fitting me out in splendid white silk and
gold-embroidered wedding garments which had been sent to Feisal lately
(was it a hint ?) by his great-aunt in Mecca. I took a stroll in the new
looseness of them round the palm gardens of Mubarak and Bruka, to
accustom myself to their feel.
These villages were pleasant little places, built
of mud brick on the high earth mounds encircling the palm-gardens. Nakhl
Mubarak lay to the north, and Bruka just south of it across a thorny
valley. The houses were small, mud-washed inside, cool, and very clean,
furnished with a mat or two, a coffee mortar, and food pots and trays.
The narrow streets were shaded by an occasional well-grown tree. The
earth embankments round the cultivated areas were sometimes fifty feet
in height, and had been for the most part artificially formed from the
surplus earth dug out between the trees, from household rubbish and from
stones gathered out of the Wadi.
The banks were to defend the crops from flood. Wadi
Yenbo otherwise would soon have filled the gardens, since these, to be
irrigable, must be below the valley floor. The narrow plots were divided
by fences of palm-ribs or by mud walls, with narrow streams of sweet
water in raised channels round them. Each garden gate was over water,
with a bridge of three or four parallel palm-logs built up to it for the
passage of donkeys or camels. Each plot had a mud sluice, scooped away
when its turn for watering came. The palms, regularly planted in ordered
lines and well cared
for, were the main crop; but between them were grown barley, radishes,
marrows, cucumbers, tobacco and henna. Villages higher up Wadi Yenbo
were cool enough to grow grapes.
Feisal's stand in Nakhl Mubarak could in the nature
of things only be a pause, and I felt that I had better get back to
Yenbo, to think seriously about our amphibious defence of this port, the
Navy having promised its every help. We settled that I should consult
Zeid, and act with him as seemed best. Feisal gave me a magnificent bay
camel for the trip back. We marched through the Agida hills by a new
road, Wadi Messarih, because of a scare of Turkish patrols on the more
direct line. Bedr ibn Shefia was with me; and we did the distance gently
in a single stage of six hours, getting to Yenbo before dawn. Being
tired after three strenuous days of little sleep among constant alarms
and excitements I went straight to Garland's empty house (he was living
on board ship in the harbour) and fell asleep on a bench; but afterwards
I was called out again by the news that Sherif Zeid was coming, and went
down to the walls to see the beaten force ride in.
There were about eight hundred of them, quiet, but
in no other way mortified by their shame. Zeid himself seemed finely
indifferent. As he entered the town he turned and cried to Abd el Kadir,
the Governor, riding behind him, 'Why, your town is ruinous! I must
telegraph to my father for forty masons to repair the public buildings.'
And this actually he did. I had telegraphed to Captain Boyle that Yenbo
was gravely threatened, and Boyle at once replied that his fleet would
be there in time, if not sooner. This readiness was an opportune
consolation: worse news came along next day. The Turks, by throwing a
strong force forward from Bir Said against Nakhl Mubarak, had closed
with Feisal's levies while they were yet unsteady. After a short fight,
Feisal had broken off, yielded his ground, and was retreating here. Our
war seemed entering its last act. I took my camera, and from the parapet
of the Medina gate got a fine photograph of the brothers coming in.
Feisal had nearly two thousand men with him, but none of the Juheina
tribesmen. It looked like treachery and a real defection of the tribes,
things which both of us had ruled out of court as impossible.
I called at once at his house and he told me the
history. The Turks had come on with three battalions and a number of
mule-mounted infantry and camelry. Their command was in the hands of
Ghalib Bey, who handled his troops with great keenness, acting as he did
under the eye of the
Corps Commander. Fakhri Pasha privately accompanied the expedition,
whose guide and go-between with the Arabs was Dakhil-Allah el Kadhi, the
hereditary law-giver of the Juheina, a rival of Sherif Mohammed Ali el
Beidawi, and after him the second man in the tribe.
They got across Wadi Yenbo to the groves of Bruka
in their first onset, and thus threatened the Arab communications with
Yenbo. They were also able to shell Nakhl Mubarak freely with their
seven guns. Feisal was not a whit dismayed, but threw out the Juheina on
his left to work down the great valley. His centre and right he kept in
Nakhl Mubarak, and he sent the Egyptian artillery to take post in Jebel
Agida, to deny that to the Turks. Then he opened fire on Bruka with his
own two fifteen-pounders.
Rasim, a Syrian officer, formerly a battery
commander in the Turkish Army, was fighting these two guns; and he made
a great demonstration with them. They had been sent down as a gift from
Egypt, anyhow, old rubbish thought serviceable for the wild Arabs, just
as the sixty thousand rifles supplied the Sherif were condemned weapons,
relics of the Gallipoli campaign. So Rasim had no sights, nor
range-finder, no range tables, no high explosive.
His distance might have been six thousand yards;
but the fuses of his shrapnel were Boer War antiquities, full of green
mould, and, if they burst, it was sometimes short in the air, and
sometimes grazing. However, he had no means of getting his ammunition
away if things went wrong, so he blazed off at speed, shouting with
laughter at this fashion of making war; and the tribesmen seeing the
commandant so merry took heart of grace themselves. 'By God,' said one,
'those are the real guns: the Importance of their noise!' Rasim swore
that the Turks were dying in heaps; and the Arabs charged forward
warmly, at his word.
Things were going well; and Feisal had the hope of
a decisive success when suddenly his left wing in the valley wavered,
halted; finally it turned its back on the enemy and retired tumultuously
to the camping ground. Feisal, in the centre, galloped to Rasim and
cried that the Juheina had broken and he was to save the guns. Rasim
yoked up the teams and trotted away to Wadi Agida, wherein the Egyptians
were taking counsel pavidly with one another. After him streamed the
Ageyl and the Atban, the men of Ibn Shefia, the Harb and Biasha. Feisal
and his household composed the rear, and in deliberate procession they
moved down towards Yenbo, leaving the Juheina with the Turks on the
battlefield.
As
I was still hearing of this sad end, and cursing with him the traitor
Beidawi brothers, there was a stir about the door, and Abd el Kerim
broke through the slaves, swung up to the dais, kissed Feisal's
head-rope in salutation, and sat down beside us. Feisal with a gasping
stare at him said, 'How?' and Abd el Kerim explained their dismay at the
sudden flight of Feisal, and how he with his brother and their gallant
men had fought the Turks for the whole night, alone, without artillery,
till the palm-groves became untenable and they too had been driven
through Wadi Agida. His brother, with half the manhood of the tribe, was
just entering the gate. The others had fallen back up Wadi Yenbo for
water.
'And why did you retire to the camp-ground behind
us during the battle?' asked Feisal. 'Only to make ourselves a cup of
coffee,' said Abd el Kerim. 'We had fought from sunrise and it was dusk:
we were very tired and thirsty.' Feisal and I lay back and laughed: then
we went to see what could be done to save the town.
The first step was simple. We sent all the Juheina
back to Wadi Yenbo with orders to mass at Kheif, and keep up a steady
pressure on the Turkish line of communications. They were also to push
sniping parties down the Agida hills. This diversion would hold up so
many of the Turks that they would be unable to bring against Yenbo a
force superior in number to the defenders, who in addition had the
advantage of a good position. The town on the top of its flat reef of
coral rose perhaps twenty feet above the sea, and was compassed by water
on two sides. The other two sides looked over flat stretches of sand,
soft in places, destitute of cover for miles, and with no fresh water
upon them anywhere. In daylight, if defended by artillery and
machine-gun fire, they should be impregnable.
The artillery was arriving every minute; for Boyle,
as usual far better than his word, had concentrated five ships on us in
less than twenty-four hours. He put the monitor M.31, whose
shallow draught fitted her for the job, in the end of the south-eastern
creek of the harbour, whence she could rake the probable direction of a
Turkish advance with her six-inch guns. Crocker, her captain, was very
anxious to let off those itching guns. The larger ships were moored to
fire over the town at longer range, or to rake the other flank from the
northern harbour. The searchlights of Dufferin and M.31
crossed on the plain beyond the town.
The Arabs, delighted to count up the quantity of
vessels in the harbour,
were prepared to contribute their part to the night's entertainment.
They gave us good hope there would be no further panic: but to reassure
them fully they needed some sort of rampart to defend, mediaeval
fashion: it was no good digging trenches, partly because the ground was
coral rock, and, besides, they had no experience of trenches and might
not have manned them confidently. So we took the crumbling, salt-riddled
wall of the place, doubled it with a second, packed earth between the
two, and raised them till our sixteenth-century bastions were
rifle-proof at least, and probably proof against the Turkish mountain
guns. Outside the bastions we put barbed wire, festooned between
cisterns on the rain catchments beyond the walls. We dug in machine-gun
nests in the best angles, and manned them with Feisal's regular gunners.
The Egyptians, like everyone else given a place in the scheme, were
gratifyingly happy. Garland was engineer-in-chief and chief adviser.
After sun-down the town quivered with suppressed
excitement. So long as the day lasted there had been shouts and
joy-shots and wild bursts of frenzy among the workmen; but when dark
came they went back to feed and a hush fell. Nearly everyone sat up that
night. There was one alarm about eleven o'clock. Our outposts had met
the enemy only three miles outside the town. Garland, with a crier, went
through the few streets, and called the garrison. They tumbled straight
out and went to their places in dead silence without a shot or a loose
shout. The seamen on the minaret sent warning to the ships, whose
combined searchlights began slowly to traverse the plain in complex
intersections, drawing pencils of wheeling light across the flats which
the attacking force must cross. However, no sign was made and no cause
given us to open fire.
Afterwards, old Dakhil Allah told me he had guided
the Turks down to rush Yenbo in the dark that they might stamp out
Feisal's army once for all; but their hearts had failed them at the
silence and the blaze of lighted ships from end to end of the harbour,
with the eerie beams of the searchlights revealing the bleakness of the
glacis they would have to cross. So they turned back: and that night, I
believe, the Turks lost their war. Personally, I was on the Suva,
to be undisturbed, and sleeping splendidly at last; so I was grateful to
Dakhil Allah for the prudence which he preached the Turks, as though we
might perhaps have won a glorious victory, I was ready to give much more
for just that eight hours' unbroken rest.
