In the afternoon, Lawrence made it his business to stroll around the wadi, chatting with Feisal’s troops. He felt that they were in fine fettle for a defeated army. The Bedu, who had made camp in the palm-groves, mostly belonged to the Juhayna, a large tribe based in the Wadi Yanbu’ to the north, and to the Harb, their deadly enemies. Lawrence saw that Feisal had done a remarkable job in reconciling the traditional foes to fight side by side for the Hashemite cause. He was under no illusion though: it was Hashemite money – ultimately from British coffers – which had bought the Bedu’s allegiance, and if things went badly, they might easily desert to the enemy. The British conception of the tribal levies as a feudal army under the noble Sharifs was quite wrong. In feudal Europe serfs had been the chattels of their lords and bound to military service when required. Not so the Bedu. They were not bound to anyone or anything but their own tribe, and for this reason would not consider it bowqa – treachery – to change sides, as long as such a defection were agreed by the tribe or the family as a whole. The people they served – Hashemites or Turks – were aliens. The Turks already had Bedu irregulars working for them. The Billi, a powerful and xenophobic tribe to the north, were still wavering, and one of their Sheikhs, Suleyman Rifada, had already declared for the Turks. If the Billi went over to the Turks en bloc, then the Juhayna might follow. Nevertheless, Lawrence reckoned that the Turks were spending Ј70,000 a month on attempts to buy the tribes, and were receiving mostly empty promises in return. He believed that ultimately the Hashemites had a sentimental appeal to the Bedu which the Turks could not equal.

This was the first time Lawrence had been close to the Bedu, and he was thrilled by their appearance, and awed by their toughness. Not all were nomads – most, indeed, were cultivators and semi-nomads, and many were armed slaves and retainers of the desert folk. Their ages ranged from twelve to sixty – small, dark, spare, bird-like, elegant men, clad only in loose dishdashas, baggy sirwals and headcloths, bristling with cartridge-belts and rifles which they would fire off at any excuse. They were superbly fit, and could run and walk in the sun for hours barefoot over rock and burning sand. They moved with a quick nervousness which gave the impression of the need to burn offboundless energy. Lawrence thought they would make superb guerrilla fighters and, when trained properly, excellent snipers. They would run and climb long distances in order to find themselves the right niche for a shot, though they were as yet more used to their slow old muskets than modern rifles with sights, and were accustomed to engage their enemies at short range. They had an intimate knowledge of the terrain and their tracking skills appeared almost supernatural. As conventional troops, though, Lawrence felt that they would be useless. For one thing, the actual personnel were constantly shifting as tribesmen returned home to visit their wives, handing their rifle to a brother or a cousin to take their place. Sometimes an entire clan would get bored and quit. They would not take orders from anyone but their own tribal Sheikhs, and would not serve beside an enemy tribe unless they were under the command of a Sharif, who was thought to be above tribal politics. As individuals they were brave and reckless, but the cult of reputation by which they lived made them poor team-players. Every man was his own master, and he would not readily obey commands, fight in line, or help strangers merely because they happened to be in the same army. The Bedu were obsessively clannish: ‘Me and my cousin against a stranger, me and my brother against my cousin,’ was their modus vivendi. Their traditional raid or ghazwa was fought to specific rules – an attack was never made by night; women, children and unarmed shepherds were inviolate; at least one camel was always left so that the victims could survive. It was also fought for property – usually camels – rather than life. Their way of fighting did not allow of high casualties, which the ancient rule of lex talionis – blood-feud – had for generations proscribed. Their way was the way of the individual warrior – this new-fangled method of warfare, of faceless armies and weapons that killed indiscriminately from afar, was beyond their ken. To the Bedu, each fellow-tribesman was a valued individual rather than just another soldier, which was why they had traditionally turned tail when faced with resolute opposition or greater numbers. As early as 1830, Burckhardt described Arab warfare as that of partisans whose main object was to surprise the enemy by sudden attack and plunder his camp:¹⁷ ‘I could adduce,’ he wrote, ‘numerous instances of caravan-travellers and peasants putting to flight three times their number of Arabs [Bedu] who attacked them: hence …they are reckoned miserable cowards and their contests with the peasants always prove them such.’¹⁸ C. S. Jarvis called them ‘very good ten minute fighters’ – and added, ‘there is nothing so savage and terrifying as Arab horsemen dealing with a demoralised enemy; and nothing quite so easy as the same Arabs with the “wind up” ‘.¹⁹ Pierce Joyce would write that the Bedu were ‘more of a bluff than a real menace’, and felt that the notion of working to a set programme was an impossibility for them.²⁰ Alec Kirkbride would say later: ‘You could get a terrific charge out of them. If it came off, splendid, but if it didn’t, well, they ran away. That seemed the only sensible thing to do.’²¹ Lawrence thought that they would be good for dynamiting the railway, plundering Turkish caravans or stealing camels, and noted in his report later that while one might sneer at their mercenary nature, despite considerable bribes from the Turks the tribes were not helping them, and the Hashemite supply caravans were still plying through the hills unmolested.

Later that afternoon Lawrence saw Feisal again, and this time they got on much better. If Feisal’s plan to distract them failed, Lawrence thought, the Turks’ next move would probably be to advance on Mecca through Rabegh. In this case the Bedu irregulars could best be used to hold the Subh hills around the Wadi Safra, which formed a natural defensive line. The Turkish army would have no choice but to advance through the wadis, and their twists and turns would be a godsend for guerrilla troops. Even the Turkish artillery would not benefit them much in the hills. He thought that the Arabs should be strengthened with Lewis machine-guns, and some modern field artillery for the sake of their morale, and that they needed technical advisers, better liaison with the British GHQ, and even wireless sets. Though the tribal force would never be capable of an offensive, he thought, it would make a strong defensive screen behind which a regular field-force recruited from slaves, townsfolk and peasants could be built up. Lawrence felt that if Feisal could just hold out in these hills for two months, then al-Masri could train up his column of Arab regulars in Rabegh. As for landing British troops there, Lawrence thought that nothing would be more certain to destroy the Hashemite cause. He noted in his report that Feisal and his aides had no sympathy with the Arab Nationalists hanged in Damascus and Beirut, because they had been in league with the French, hinting strongly to his superiors that the Arabs had no intention of handing their country over to another foreign master, and would thus be highly suspicious of any massed landing of British troops. The intuition was correct, but the facts were almost certainly a fabrication – in Feisal’s case at least, for there are eye-witness reports that he was outraged by the Nationalist hangings when he heard about them in Damascus. In his reports, Lawrence also misrepresented the tribesmen as being intensely nationalistic: in fact they were chauvinistic, xenophobic and fanatically anti-Christian. A British landing would be certain to shatter Hashemite prestige, and drive the tribes into the arms of the Turks. He left at four o’clock in the afternoon of 24 October, with an escort of fourteen tribesmen of the Juhayna, heading for Yanbu’, not expecting to see the Sharif again. He was satisfied that in Feisal the British had a hero they could influence and manipulate, or as he put it, with characteristic ambiguity, a leader ‘with reason to give effect to our science’. He was also confident that he had solved the conundrum of Rabegh: ‘I told my chiefs,’ he wrote, ‘that Mecca was defended not by the obstacle of Rabegh, but by the flank threat of Feisal in [the Subh hills].’²²