With a little assistance from the Royal Navy, but with few trained troops and little modern equipment, the Hashemites had captured most of the vital towns of the Hejaz, taking some 6,000 prisoners and a vast amount of military hardware. More than this, they had scored a brilliant propaganda success: Turco-German dreams of a Jihad or Holy War were dead. Jamal Pasha admitted as much publicly in a speech, in which he called Hussain a ‘traitor’ and a ‘vile individual’. For the Arabs, the problem was that Medina, not Mecca, was the key to the Hejaz, and they had not captured it. Medina was not only a self-supporting oasis, far beyond the range of British naval guns, but it was also linked directly to the outside world by the Hejaz railway. By June it had a large garrison of at least 12,000 men under a gifted, resolute and ruthless commander named Fakhri Pasha, the notorious ‘Butcher of Urfa’. Hussain and his sons slowly realized that they had underestimated the power of the railway. While Medina remained in Turkish hands, the Turks could move any amount of men and material into the Hejaz at will, and launch a counter-attack at their leisure.

After raising the flag on 5 June, ‘Ali and Feisal had divided their force of Bedu into three detachments, one of which had torn up the railway tracks north of Medina with their bare hands and flung the rails down the embankment. This achieved nothing, for without explosives they could do no permanent damage, and the Turks, who had repair teams in their fortress-stations, had no shortage of spare track. Muhit was the first station on the railway, thirteen miles northwest of Medina, a solid building of black basalt, guarded by a massive blockhouse, standing under a crust of low hills. On the morning of 8 June, ‘Ali’s snipers poured fire into the buildings from concealed places in the surrounding hills, while another detachment skirmished across the open plain towards the position. The Turks were well-entrenched and easily turned back the advance with a clatter of machine-gun fire. Worse, a large force of infantry under the personal leadership of Fakhri Pasha had sallied forth from Medina, and fell on them from the rear. The Arabs retreated into the hills and regrouped, making a massed sortie against Medina which was again met with a solid wall of fire from artillery and machine-guns. The noise of the cannon so terrified the Bedu that they turned and ran. The ‘Utayba and the ‘Agayl took shelter among the black stones of a lava scree and refused to budge. Feisal, riding a white mare and dressed conspicuously in his finest Sharifian robes, paced up and down steadily through a rain of Turkish bullets and bursting shells trying to rally them. It was to no avail; the Bedu had no experience of this kind of carnage. Feisal had been relying on the Bani ‘Ali, a tribe of cultivators who inhabited the village of ‘Awali outside the town walls, to hold the city’s water supply. But the roar of the guns and the flight of the Bedu irregulars were too much for them. They asked the Turks for a truce, and while they were parleying, Fakhri’s men encircled the village. Then, on a signal, they moved in with fixed bayonets and massacred every man, woman and child, burning the houses and setting machine-guns at the gates to cut down the fleeing victims as they ran out. Feisal and a handful of Bedu who came to the rescue too late were appalled. This wanton butchery of women and children was an atrocity which they would never forget. It was the final nerve-shattering blow to their morale, and the Hashemites were obliged to retreat, first to Bir Mashi, south of the city, and then to Wadi Aqiq. The Turks pursued them as doggedly as bloodhounds, driving them from place to place, until they split up, Feisal taking his troops to Yanbu ‘an-Nakhl – a palm oasis in the hills on the Medina-Yanbu’ road – and ‘Ali to Wadi Ithm, about thirty miles to the south-west of Medina, where, almost out of food, he barely managed to hang on. The Turks now began to push forward relentlessly, collecting camels from the surrounding tribes for transport, capturing and fortifying wells and strong-points. The Arab forces were almost out of supplies and ammunition, and what little they had was reaching them from Mecca, rather than from the beach-head at Rabegh. In mid-July ‘Ali’s force was increased by a detachment of regular Arab soldiers – former members of Ottoman Divisions seized by the British as prisoners-of-war, and released from prison-camps in Egypt as volunteers for the Arab cause. They were under the command of a highly capable young Iraqi artillery officer called Nuri as-Sa’id, who, on reaching ‘Ali’s position, saw that his situation was hopeless. ‘Ali had no information about the enemy’s movements, and Nuri had to locate the three Turkish battalions tracking him by sending out his men as decoys to draw fire. Ammunition was low, and the Turks were in possession of the nearest water sources. Nuri felt that the Bedu troops were incapable of holding a Turkish advance, and advised ‘Ali to withdraw to the coast, where, in the comforting shelter of British naval guns, the nucleus of a regular Arab army might be formed under the command of Aziz ‘Ali al-Masri – another distinguished and brilliant Arab defector from the Turks, who had fought with the Senussi in the Libyan desert, and had now devised a detailed strategy for the Arab Revolt. Al-Masri proposed to form a ‘flying column’ of trained Arab volunteers 8,000 strong, which, with eight mountain-guns, would move north from the Hejaz into Syria, wrecking the railway but never fighting pitched battles with the Turks. The scheme, later to be adapted by Lawrence, was scotched by Hussain, who was suspicious of his Syrian officers and felt that such a ‘flying column’ would be beyond his control. Indeed, the guerrilla strategist al-Masri was later sacked by the Sharif – an irreplaceable loss to the revolt. For now, however, Nuri advised ‘Ali to withdraw to Rabegh. In doing so, the Sharif could also find out why none of the thousands of rifles and tons of supplies the British had landed there had reached them in the field.

In Rabegh, ‘Ali quickly discovered the answer to this last question: the supplies had been stolen by Sheikh Hussain ibn Mubeiriq of the Zebayd Harb, who had been put in charge of the port. Ibn Mubeiriq, who had an old blood-feud with the Hashemites, was secretly a Turkish sympathizer. ‘Ali sent word to his youngest brother, Zayd, who arrived with Ahmad bin Mansur and a troop of his Bani Salem, took possession of ibn Mubeiriq’s villages by force and seized the stores, driving the ‘traitor’ and his men out into the hills where they lingered like malevolent spirits. Instead of returning to the field, however, ‘Ali and Zayd settled down to wait for al-Masri and Nuri as-Sa’id to build up their forces, leaving Feisal to face the Turks alone. The situation was fast becoming critical. Feisal, who had taken up a position on the Darb Sultani – the main road to the coast – had under his command 4,000 irregulars with rifles and the Egyptian artillery, whose ancient field-pieces were far outranged by the Turks’ Krupp mountain-guns. In Medina, Fakhri’s forces now amounted to twelve battalions with sixteen mountain-guns and two heavy field-pieces – thanks to the railway, fresh troops were arriving all the time. Feisal’s forces were unable to meet the Turks head-on, and the Sharif sent camel-mounted raiding-parties, under the ferocious young Sharif ‘Ali ibn Hussain of the Harith, to harass them by night, hitting guard-posts and convoys and fading back into the hills. These pinpricks were hardly felt by the enemy, but they were costly in Arab lives, and Feisal’s Bedu were melting rapidly back to their tents and villages. Feisal could not prevent them: they were hired on a daily rate, and he had no money to pay them with. He was obliged at one point to have a chest filled with heavy stones and put a guard on it at night to convince his troops that he was still solvent. Feisal felt that at the very most he could hold out for three weeks, but to push the Turks back to Medina was now impossible. At the end of August he rode down to the coast, where at Yanbu’ he met Lieutenant-Colonel Cyril Wilson, who had been posted to jeddah as British representative. Wilson, who was actually Governor of the Red Sea Province of the Sudan, was spokesman for Sir Reginald Wingate, the officer responsible for supplying the Hashemites from neighbouring Port Sudan. This had been Feisal’s first meeting with a British officer, and he had complained volubly about the lack of ammunition and supplies, which were supposed to be reaching him from the beach-head at Rabegh. He wanted machine-guns, modern artillery and aircraft, as well as a contingent of British troops at Rabegh. The Turks were clearly building up for an advance on Mecca, for which Rabegh, as the major source of water on the Darb Sultani, would be a vital stepping-stone. The Arab regulars at Rabegh were not yet ready to hold it, and the Bedu could not hold it either. Feisal felt that the only solution was to land a seasoned British brigade. Hussain agreed that such a landing was necessary, but thought it should be limited to 300 men. He feared to allow Christian soldiers – or even Muslim soldiers in Christian pay – to land en masse on sacred soil, for the Turks, who had now appointed a rival Sharif, ‘Ali Haydar, as Emir of Mecca in his place, were already declaring that Hussain had ‘sold out’ to the British infidels. On recapturing Mecca, their first act would be to hang Hussain publicly as a traitor and install ‘Ali Haydar as Emir. Feisal met Wilson for a second time in early September, together with Lieutenant-Colonel A. C. Parker – now posted to the Hejaz as intelligence officer – and repeated his urgent request for British troops at Rabegh. Wilson and Parker were convinced that the Arab Revolt was about to collapse, and had rushed to Cairo on the Dufferin to persuade Murray to send a British force. As September faded into October, though, no such force arrived. The weather grew cooler and a Turkish advance on Mecca looked increasingly imminent. All that stood in the way of the juggernaut was the thin, ragged band of Feisal’s Bedu, hidden in the hills.