Back in Cairo, Lawrence found that Medforce had now been amalgamated with the British Force in Egypt, and that Murray was already planning to use the extra troops in a pre-emptive strike into Sinai. This, at least, he thought, was a move for the better. His approval was not to last for long: Murray turned out to be another orthodox soldier of the old school, who mistrusted intelligence departments and Eastern veterans like Clayton. He divided the now expanded Department, moving many of the officers to his new operational G H Q at Ismailiyya, and leaving only seven – including Lawrence – to make up Cairo Intelligence at the Savoy. Lawrence was glad to see Hogarth, who had arrived in Cairo in March wearing the uniform of a Lieutenant-Commander in the RNVR. At last he had found himself a war job in the Geographical Section of Naval Intelligence, but had been seconded to Egypt where he would help set up the new ‘Arab Bureau’, which was to be knocked together from Clayton’s remnant intelligence officers at the Savoy, but was to answer to the civil authority – High Commissioner McMahon. The Bureau was to be run under the aegis of the Foreign Office, and to be responsible for political developments in the Middle East. In effect, ‘Intrusive’ – as it was codenamed – had been created not only to foment and support insurrection among the Arabs, but also as a tool to spread the gospel of such insurrection into the most exalted circles of British power: ‘We meant to break into the accepted halls of British foreign policy,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘and build a new people in the East.’³⁹ To begin with, though, Lawrence was not a member of the ‘band of wild men’, as he put it, but retained his old job in Cairo Intelligence. He was, nevertheless, given the task of editing the Bureau’s intelligence summary, the Arab Bulletin. This was work after his own heart, for his excursion to Kut had confirmed him in the belief that he was no man of action. He had made his pilgrimage to the front line, and was now resigned to spending the rest of the war in the office: ‘the most interesting place there is,’ he wrote, ‘until the Near East settles down.’⁴⁰ There were hopes in the Hejaz, of course, but despite the lengthy negotiations, no one really believed that, when the chips were down, the Sharif would fight. Then, the day before the first issue of the Arab Bulletin was published, a dramatic development took place. At dawn on 5 June 1916 – the day on which Lord Kitchener was drowned in the North Sea – Sharifs ‘Ali and Feisal raised the scarlet banner of the Hashemites under the walls of Medina, and, in the name of all the Arabs, declared an end to the rule of the Ottoman Turks.

PART TWO

THE WARRIOR

October 1916–October 1918

11. The Biggest Thing in the Near East Since 1550

The Outbreak of the Arab Revolt 1916

It was a harsh land, a thirsty land, a land scorching under a sky of burnished cobalt blue, an inferno of blazing light. It was a place of naked peaks, scarred, cracked and hammered into fantastic forms, a place where dust-devils unreeled across the aching loneliness, a place of deep dry valleys, of saltbush, thornscrub and sedge, of waterless swathes of sand, of crunching black gravel and dark volcanic stones the Bedu called harra. Its name – al-Hejaz – signified ‘The Barrier’, yet for countless generations it had been a highway for pilgrimage and trade. Long before Islam, great caravans had tramped its wastes carrying frankincense from the spice kingdoms of South Arabia to the ports of the Levant. Bilqis, the legendary Queen of Sheba, had passed this way on her journey to King Solomon’s court. No great civilizations had ever flourished here, but scattered through these skeletal, glittering hills and plains were oases of millions of palm-trees – Medina, Yanbu’ an-Nakhl, Tayma, Khaybar, Daydan, Ta’if – like vast green islands in the wastes. At Mecca, a place set in a valley so arid that cultivation was impossible, lay a sacred enclave – a haram – where no beast might be hunted, no tree cut, nor human blood spilt. Since the Time of Ignorance, men had come there to worship before the great black stone of al-Ka’aba which had fallen from the stars.

Between such oases, the wilderness was trawled by the desert and hill folk – the Bedu – a people in endless movement, endlessly changing, endlessly adapting to the whims of the land: now staying in one place long enough to plant seeds, now furling their black tents and setting their camels’ heads towards some distant pasture. The changes came slowly, generation by generation, and the Bedu, who had virtually no history, could not remember that things had ever been different, and believed their ways immutable and hallowed by time. Their records, enshrined in verse and handed down from mouth to mouth, were endless tales of war upon war, or clan against clan and tribe against tribe, of interminable raids and skirmishes. Such wars were fought with ‘white weapons’ – the swordblade and the spear. Fighting with these arms, a man could scarcely be slain without his killer being known to the entire world. Vengeance would be certain. It was the absolute law of lex talionis – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth – that prevailed, and the Bedu had a saying which underlined the slow inevitability of the vendetta: ‘Forty years on, the Bedui took his revenge.’ By Bedu tradition, vengeance might fall on any adult male relative of the killer within five generations – which was as far back as anyone could recall his own true ancestry. Beyond one’s great-great-great grandfather, genealogy passed into the nebula of myth. The tribe itself was something of an abstract entity, consisting of a number of five-generation families who simply felt they belonged together while not necessarily being related by blood. Yet this tribe was the refuge and sanctuary of every individual. Though the tribes were violently independent and quite often in a state of hostility with one another, within them there was a feeling of passionate unity and solidarity known as ‘asabiyya, and in it lay the true strength of Arabia. Individuals owed no personal allegiance to any other: they owed their loyalty eternally to the tribe.

In the Hejaz, the Bedu lived on the milk of their she-camels, on dates and grain from their own oasis gardens, for here there was no transition from the desert to the sown. The great tribes of western Arabia – the ‘Utayba, the Harb, the Juhayna, the Billi, the Muttar and the Bani ‘Atiya – consisted of families who lived in a continuum of lifestyles, from fully nomadic, to semi-nomadic, to villagers who scarcely moved at all. Yet while the more mobile tended to sneer at the more settled, they were kinsmen, and all were considered honourable, and derived honour from the reputation of the tribe. For though the individual members of a tribe were equals, and the Sheikhs simply primes inter pares, the tribes themselves were not. The tribes which were most powerful at any given moment were considered the most ‘noble’, and altered their genealogies accordingly. There were certain outcast tribes, such as the Shararat, the ‘Awazim and the Hutaym, who were not accepted as warriors, and with whom no one would marry, and an anomalous folk called the Solayb, who were tinkers, hunters and medicine-men. Another group, the ‘Agayl, fitted none of these categories. Mostly settled villagers from the Qasim oases of Najd, the ‘Agayl were not a tribe but a brotherhood of camel-dealers and caravan guides known everywhere in Arabia as honest brokers and superb camel-handlers, and a force of mercenaries respected as brave fighters, who would remain loyal to those they had undertaken to protect. Though the ‘Agayl were not Bedu, they were considered honourable in every part of the land. Bedu life was hard, but the idea that it was a ‘death in life’, as Lawrence later claimed, shows more about his own character than the nature of the Bedu. In fact, their culture was so perfectly adapted to the desert that they felt at home there. Their herds of camels, goats and sheep were their survival machines: much that they used could be garnered from their own materials – the rest they could trade for in the towns. They lived not by material wealth – a transient thing in such desolation – but by the cult of reputation. A man gained honour by displaying courage, endurance, hospitality, generosity and loyalty, and while no strange caravan, nor traveller, nor rival tent was free from his depredations, there was no more honourable travelling companion nor host once he had shared bread and salt. Raiding for camels was the spice of his life, and a means of acquiring reputation, and his hand was turned against every man, unless it suited him. His services could be bought with gold, but his soul could not.