Setting the Desert on Fire: T.E. Lawrence and Britain's Secret War in Arabia, 1916-18

375 Pages·2012·4.95 MB·English

by  James Barr

SETTING THE DESERT ON FIRE
T. E. Lawrence and
Britain’s Secret War in Arabia,
1916–18
JAMES BARR
Contents
Prologue
1 A Parting of the Ways
2 Will This Do?
3 A Strange Uncanny Place
4 Foreign Influences
5 All Claws and Teeth
6 Crisis over Rabigh
7 Turning Point
8 Wajh and After
9 The First Railway Raids
10 Differences over Tactics
11 Fighting for Us on a Lie
12 Aqaba
13 The Impact of Aqaba
14 Impolitic Truths
15 Difficult Times
16 Gaza and Yarmuk
17 Dara or Azrak?
18 The Jews and Jerusalem
19 Fighting de Luxe
20 New Conditions
21 A Complete Muck-up
22 Preparing for the Push
23 Holding Operations
24 The Dara Raid
25 The Road to Damascus
26 A House with No Door
Epilogue
Notes on the Key Figures in this Book
A Note on the Text
Plate Section
Maps
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Footnotes
Notes
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
List of Illustrations
Prologue
On 26 March 2005, I found what I had been looking for. In a stony valley in the
Hijaz mountains of western Saudi Arabia, one hundred miles north of Medina,
stands a rust-brown steam engine. It rests ten yards off the railway embankment
it once plied, its wheels half sunk in the drifting desert sand, pointing north.
Further up the line ahead of it, its tender is heading in the opposite direction. A
jumble of upside-down, skewed wheels are all that remains of two more
carriages. Like the railway track itself, their wooden sides have long since
disappeared. Here, among some stunted thornbushes and under the silty blue
desert sky, is an unsettling scene of headlong disaster.1
A closer look among the wreckage provides a likely cause for this
catastrophe. A brutal dent in the back of the firebox – still hot to the touch,
though now from the heat of the ferocious midday sun – and below it a chunk of
missing floor where the stoker would have stood, both suggest that an explosion
beneath the wheels blasted this engine off the track: this train was probably
mined. Today, it is one of only four remaining wrecks along the vanished railway
line, slowly disintegrating memorials to a secret war, directed by the British, that
began in June 1916.
Seven hundred miles further north and three years earlier, in a back street of
the ancient city of Damascus – the capital of modern Syria – I had seen a line of
similar, elderly steam engines, woven to some sidings by dry grass growing
through their wheels. It was this glimpse that first sparked my curiosity. These
were the shunting yards of the northern terminus of the Hijaz Railway, which
once linked Damascus with the holy city of Medina, where the Prophet
Muhammad, founder of Islam, is buried.
Begun in 1900, the Hijaz Railway was the brainchild of the Ottoman sultan,
Abdul Hamid, and it attracted British suspicions from the start. Before it was
even finished, the hawkish foreign editor of The Times, Valentine Chirol,
described the project as an effort by the Sultan to ‘link up the seat of his
temporal power as Sultan at Constantinople with the seat of his spiritual power
as Caliph of Mecca’. The Sultan’s strategy, Chirol claimed, was designed to
enhance ‘throughout the Mahomedan world the spiritual authority to which he
lays claim as heir to the Caliphate of Islam’.2 The Caliph – the deputy or
successor to the Prophet Muhammad – was the title conferred on Muhammad’s
closest followers after his death; the Caliphate the extensive empire they had
conquered. The title was appropriated by the Ottomans in the fifteenth century.
Even at the beginning of the twentieth century the Ottoman sultan maintained a
sway as Caliph among Sunni Muslims that mesmerised the British. Chirol, who
like many other Britons treated Muslims as a potentially fanatical mass, believed
that the Sultan’s power as Caliph gave him a disturbing and disruptive influence
worldwide. In particular, the British feared the Sultan would use his position to
upset the stability of Britain’s eastern Empire, home to 100 million of the global
population of nearly 300 million Muslims.
The Sultan encouraged donations from Muslims around the world towards the
railway. Muslims in India, the British government took note, gave generously.
According to one official estimate five million rupees were sent from India
towards the scheme, at a time when the average income of a Bombay family was
fifty-two rupees a month.3 Donations paid for one-third of the cost of the
railway, which reached Medina in 1908, a year ahead of schedule. For eight
years afterwards the Hijaz Railway transformed travel through a lawless land. A
forty-day desert march or an expensive voyage by sea down through the British-
controlled Suez Canal now took just three days by train. The Sultan, as a
consequence, basked in the gratitude of Muslims worldwide. His grip, which had
been waning, seemed renewed; his influence, once limited, suddenly appeared to
extend far beyond the crumbling borders of the shrinking Ottoman Empire.
Chirol predicted trouble. ‘The completion of the Hijaz Railway,’ he foresaw,
‘will in a large measure relieve the Sultan from the galling dependence upon
friendly relations with Great Britain which the maintenance of his main line of
communications with Arabia now necessitates.’4 And he was right. At the
outbreak of war in 1914 the Ottomans joined the Germans’side. Encouraged by
the Germans, who were convinced that Muslim unrest could turn the advantage
of the British Empire’s enormous size into a terrible liability, that November the
Sultan made an incendiary announcement. ‘Know that our state is today at war
with the Governments of Russia, England and France and their allies, who are
the mortal enemies of Islam,’ his spokesman dramatically proclaimed from
Constantinople. ‘The commander of the Faithful, the Caliph of the Muslims,
summons you to the jihad!’5
Desperate to avert a Muslim insurrection in Egypt and in India, which would
divert British forces from the crucial Western Front, the British conceived an
astonishing and unprecedented response to blunt the force of the Sultan’s call to
holy war. They decided to intervene in Arabian tribal politics and foment a revolt
designed to divide Islam by giving the Hijaz – the holiest region of the Muslim
world – its independence. At dawn one summer morning in 1916, in the sacred
city of Mecca, that uprising finally began.
1
A Parting of the Ways
(February 1914–October 1915)
At the epicentre of the Muslim world, Mehmed Zia was crouched on the floor of
the town hall in Mecca because it was too dangerous to stand up. Now and then
bullets splurted through the building’s tall wooden shutters and spat over his
head. They left dust in the air, splinters of silvery sun-bleached timber on the
floor and an unfamiliar constellation of holes through which the molten daylight
squinted. It was early in the morning of 10 June 1916.
Zia, the Turkish commander of Ottoman forces in the holy city, considered
his situation. Three weeks earlier, news had reached Mecca that the Ottomans’
enemy, the British, had just begun to blockade the Red Sea. The great war now
raging in Europe had pitted the two powers, once allies, against each other and to
Zia this latest action must have seemed a symptom of the war’s inexorable
spread worldwide. Reports of Britain’s move had sparked a panic about food in
Mecca. The Grand Mufti – Mecca’s highest authority on religious matters – then
issued an apocalyptic warning to the inhabitants that they would starve unless
they threw the Turks out of their city. Not entirely surprisingly, from then on
relations between the Ottomans and the townspeople abruptly deteriorated.
Gunfire had finally erupted at half-past three that morning, just after the call to
prayer at dawn had ululated through the city’s close streets.
During the winter Zia might have had enough troops to stop the violence. But
it was now the height of an Arabian summer, and over half the Ottoman soldiers
who normally garrisoned Mecca were taking refuge from the ferocious summer
heat forty miles east and 4,000 feet higher in the mountain resort of Taif, up in
the chain of sandpapery mountains along the western edge of modern Saudi
Arabia which gave the region its daunting name: the Hijaz, Arabic for barrier.
Down in Mecca, where by mid-afternoon the temperature might reach forty-
five degrees Celsius, Zia had been left behind to preserve order with about a
thousand men. Almost all of these were across town in barracks on the Jeddah
road, but there was also a handful of soldiers in the Jiyad fortress which
dominated the city from the south. However, sometime before dawn the previous
day the water to the fortress and the telegraph cables to Jeddah, Medina and Taif
had all been cut. So too, Zia now discovered, had the telephone line from the
barracks. When he resorted to sending orders by hand to his forces there, his
messenger was shot within yards of leaving the town hall. The man now
sprawled dead, his blood soaking into the earthen street outside.
Having gingerly examined the bullet holes perforating his office, Zia decided
that the gunfire originated from the amphitheatre of rocky, ochre hills above the
city and that the Bedu, the wild nomadic tribesmen of the desert, were
consequently responsible. Life in the Hijaz was violent – ‘The only things made
in Mecca are swords, daggers and slippers for Arabs,’1 one visitor remarked –
and unrest among the Bedu was commonplace, especially since the Hijaz
Railway had reached Medina eight years earlier. The railway had improved the
Ottomans’ grip over this, the most southerly and significant arm of their empire.
It also made the pilgrimage to Mecca faster, cheaper and safer than before. Yet
all these advantages had brought the Ottomans into mounting conflict with the
Bedu. The tribesmen’s livelihood depended on hiring out camels and guides to
travellers, with protection rackets and robbery related subsidiary lines of
business. This was a way of life now threatened by the train, the competing
demands of the Ottoman taxman, and the diseases that followed in the wake of
the railway, like cholera, which devastated close-knit tribal families. Although
disturbances by the Bedu punctuated life in the Hijaz with growing frequency,
Zia knew that some concessions to the tribesmen would normally ensure a
ceasefire. So he tugged the telephone towards himself to ring Number One
Mecca and speak to Sharif Husein.2
As his telephone number suggested, if anyone could call the tribesmen off, it
was Husein. The Emir, or Governor, of Mecca, Husein was also a sharif, one of
about 800 men from two families, the Aoun and the Zaid, whose rivalry resulted
from their common claim to direct descent from the Prophet Muhammad. An
Aoun himself, Husein had championed – and probably secretly orchestrated –
the local tribesmen’s violent campaign to stop the railway being extended from
Medina to Mecca. And averse as he was to the forces of progress, he also loved
using the telephone.
‘I called up the Emir,’ Zia remembered, ‘and asked what this all meant,
saying at the same time, “The Bedouins have revolted against the Government;
find a way out.”’3
‘Of course we shall,’ Husein replied enigmatically, before cutting Zia off.
Since the Sultan, Abdul Hamid, had appointed him Emir at the age of fifty-
five, eight years earlier, Sharif Husein had found himself increasingly isolated.
Abdul Hamid had been deposed in 1909 and the new ‘Young Turk’ regime
which took over viewed his appointee in Mecca with suspicion. Knowing that
the Ottomans balked at forcing out a descendant of Muhammad, Husein played
heavily on his ancestry to head off jealous relatives and encroaching Ottoman
interference. He would speak slowly yet obscurely and dress austerely in a black
robe and tarbush, around which a fine white turban was tightly swirled. The
turban and his silky, almost pure white beard framed large brown eyes and a
solemn, inscrutable expression.
Husein cemented his position with grand displays of largesse, receiving and
giving coffee to as many as 3,000 Meccans in a day.4 In private, when it suited
him, he would reach across the divide he had fashioned, patting his guests with
his hand or putting his arm around their shoulder and calling them ‘Ibni’ – my
son – or ‘Habibi’ – my dear.5 ‘Such a nice old man, with a charming twinkle in
his eye,’ wrote one man fooled by these deliberately disarming tactics.6 But
another, more perceptive visitor dryly described a man who loved ‘to deal first
hand with affairs’.7 For behind Husein’s otherworldly facade lurked an obsessive
patriarch whose four sons, Ali, Abdullah, Feisal and Zeid, signed themselves off
in their letters to him as his ‘slaves’, who had reputedly ordered the murder of
some of his opponents and kept others chained to the floor of a foul prison
beneath his palace.8 Subsequently, it emerged that it was Husein himself who
had fired the single shot that triggered the crackle of gunfire across the city early
on that cloudless morning.
Behind this uprising lay the as-yet invisible hand of Britain. British overtures to
Husein dated back two years to a brief flirtation which took place in Cairo early
in 1914. Pre-war Cairo was just as hectic, cosmopolitan and filthy as it is today.
‘The streets are full of Greeks, Dagos, and French people of all sorts from
merchants to petites dames, sour and haughty Germans, Yids of every degree, a
sprinkling of Yankees and the omnipresent English,’ one wide-eyed visitor
observed.9 Old Cairo was a medieval bastion of Islamic thought where
beturbaned Arab scholars in flowing robes jostled their way past ragged
labourers in the winding, dark bazaars. Across town in the new city, local
businessmen gathered on the veranda of the Turf Club at sundown to drink gin
and criticise the government. At the Gezira Sporting Club, on an island in the
Nile, the tennis courts were crowded and the race meetings busy. Seances were