Part 11 (1/2)

Chapter 10.

Neatly in the Void The situation is so interesting that I think I will fail to come back.

T. E. LAWRENCE, IN ARABIA, TO CAIRO HEADQUARTERS, DECEMBER 27, 1916.

From the crest of the hill, the night-wrapped valley of Nakhl Mubarak yielded a startling sight. As Lawrence would recount, glimpsed through the fronds of the date-palm plantations was ”the flame-lit smoke of many fires,” while the valley echoed with the braying of thousands of excited camels, gunshots, and the calls of men lost in the darkness.

Accompanied by four tribal escorts, Lawrence had set out from the port of Yenbo earlier that evening, December 2, 1916. Their destination was Faisal's camp in the mountainous enclave of Kheif Hussein, some forty-five miles inland. With good camels beneath them and riding steadily, the group had antic.i.p.ated making the camp just around daybreak. Instead, a mere five hours into their ride and just twenty-five miles from the coast, they came upon this puzzling scene in Nakhl Mubarak; no one in Lawrence's party had any idea who these ma.s.ses of armed men in the valley below might be.

Dismounting, the group quietly descended from the ridgeline until they came to a deserted home at the valley's edge. After corralling the camels and secreting his British charge within the home, the lead escort slipped a cartridge into his carbine and set out alone on foot to investigate. He shortly returned with shocking news: the men were Faisal's army. Remounting their camels, the group proceeded into the heart of the valley, the scene more bewildering to Lawrence by the minute. ”There were hundreds of fires of thorn-wood, and round them were Arabs making coffee or eating, or sleeping m.u.f.fled like dead men in their cloaks, packed together closely in the confusion of camels.”

They found Faisal at the center of the encampment, sitting before his tent with several aides and a scribe. With illumination provided by slaves holding lanterns, he was alternately dictating orders and listening to battlefield reports being read aloud to him, the picture of placidity. It was some time before he dismissed his retinue so that he might explain the situation to his British guest. That situation wasn't good; it was little short of disastrous, in fact.

During Lawrence's first visit in October, Faisal had outlined an elaborate plan to take his war campaign north, a way to reduce the Turkish threat to Rabegh and Mecca by giving the enemy something new to worry about. That scheme depended on Faisal working in close concert with the fighting units of his three brothers. While Abdullah hara.s.sed the Turkish forces around Medina, Faisal would move the bulk of his army northwest through the mountains to Kheif Hussein before closing on the Turkish-held port of Wejh, some two hundred miles above Yenbo. Simultaneously, Zeid would come up to protect the approaches to Yenbo, while Ali brought his army out of Rabegh to guard a crucial intersection on the pilgrims' road to Mecca.

Lawrence had thought the plan too complicated by half, reliant as it was on a level of coordination among the four brothers nearly impossible to achieve across the great expanse of western Arabia. He'd conveyed his doubts to Gilbert Clayton in his reports at the time, but apparently had been less persuasive with Faisal; in mid-November, Faisal had put the scheme into effect.

For a short while all had gone accordingly, with Faisal taking most of his forces north to Kheif Hussein. At his back, however, twenty-year-old Zeid inexplicably left one of the mountain paths leading to Yenbo completely unguarded, and it was this path that a Turkish mounted patrol found. Suddenly finding the Turks between them and their escape route to the coast, Zeid's charges had promptly scattered in disarray. That had only been stage one of the fiasco, however. When they learned of Zeid's collapse, and fearful that they too might soon be stranded in the mountains, Faisal's followers had succ.u.mbed to a similar panicked stampede from Kheif Hussein. Faisal and his lieutenants had finally halted the flight there in Nakhl Mubarak, but even this, he confided to Lawrence that night, probably wouldn't hold; with the advancing Turks now to the east and south, it seemed just a matter of time before his entire force-what was left of it-fell all the way back to Yenbo port itself.

Operating on practically no sleep, Lawrence spent the next forty-eight hours alternately conferring with Faisal and circulating among the fighters in Nakhl Mubarak, trying to better gauge the magnitude of the crisis. He then raced back to Yenbo to raise the alarm. When he sat down to send an urgent message to Clayton on the morning of December 5, he was in a state of both exhaustion and despondency. ”I had better preface by saying that I rode all Sat.u.r.day night, had alarms and excursions all Sunday night, and rode again all last night, so my total of sleep is only three hours in the last three nights and I feel rather pessimistic. All the same, things are bad.”

As Lawrence well knew, the Arab rout in the mountains was much more than just a military setback. Uniting the northern tribes to his leaders.h.i.+p had required months of painstaking and delicate work on Faisal's part, and that was now rapidly coming apart. In his report to Clayton, Lawrence enumerated those tribes that had already abandoned Faisal-or appeared ready to-and warned how those defections not only threatened to leave the road open to a Turkish capture of Mecca, but to a collapse of the Arab Revolt itself. The crucial point, Lawrence wrote, was that Faisal was now ”a tribal leader, not a leader of tribes,” and it would take a long time to repair the damage. In this, too, there was a parallel to the Crusader armies of the Middle Ages that Lawrence had studied; the extreme fragility of alliances between disparate and largely autonomous groups meant unity was always one small setback away from unraveling.

But it was also a personal fiasco for Lawrence. In his October reports, he had readily conceded the difficulty of ever organizing the Arab fighters into a conventional fighting force-he'd figured that a single company of Turkish soldiers, properly entrenched in open country, could defeat them-but had been both eloquent and persuasive in emphasizing their potency as a defensive force. ”Their real sphere is guerrilla warfare.... Their initiative, great knowledge of the country, and mobility, make them formidable in the hills.” Not just formidable; in Lawrence's estimation, in such a role they would be all but impregnable. ”From what I have seen of the hills between Bir Abbas and Bir Ibn Ha.s.sani,” he had written, ”I do not see how, short of treachery on the part of the hill tribe[s], the Turks can risk forcing their way through.” To the contrary, with the hills ”a very paradise for snipers,” he was confident that a mere one or two hundred men could successfully hold any possible line of Turkish approach toward the coast.

This conviction was one of the cornerstones of Lawrence's argument against sending Allied troops into Arabia, and he had maintained it even after troubling evidence to the contrary. At the beginning of November, after rumors of a Turkish advance had sent Ali's men fleeing from the hills above Rabegh, Lawrence had intimated to edouard Bremond that matters would have turned out differently if Faisal had been in charge. As events now made clear, in this estimation he had been absolutely one hundred percent wrong.

Perhaps it was embarra.s.sment over how badly he had misjudged the situation, or perhaps even in his exhaustion Lawrence remained the ever-vigilant bureaucratic strategist, but before sending off his pessimistic cable to Clayton, he thought to scribble a postscript. If reprinted in the Arab Bulletin, his cable would soon be read by all those in the British leaders.h.i.+p who had been won to his nonintervention argument, so he jotted, ”don't use any of above in Bulletin or elsewhere; it is not just-because I am done up.”

In response to the deepening crisis, British naval s.h.i.+ps began ma.s.sing off Yenbo; if the worst did come to pa.s.s and Faisal's men were put to siege in that town, the s.h.i.+ps might at least lay down artillery fire on the surrounding open plain to slow the Turkish advance. True to Faisal's prediction, on the morning of December 9, the vanguard of his spent force began drifting into the port with the news that they'd been flushed from Nakhl Mubarak by another Turkish push; by the time the last stragglers came in, the some five thousand warriors Lawrence had seen under Fai- sal's banner just one week earlier had been reduced to fewer than two thousand. While a handful of the missing three thousand had fallen in battle, the vast majority had simply abandoned the fight and gone home to their villages.

So dispiriting was the atmosphere that even Lawrence now had second thoughts about his most stoutly held belief. Writing to Clayton again on December 11, he announced that ”Faisal has now swung around to the belief in a British force [being deployed] at Rabegh. I have wired this to you, and I see myself that his arguments have force. If Zeid had not been so slack, this would never have got to this pa.s.s.” He added a bitter afterthought: ”The Arabs, outside their hills, are worthless.”

On that same day, Lawrence painted an even more dire picture to Cyril Wilson. Without British troops in Rabegh, he wrote, Faisal was now of the opinion that the whole revolution might collapse within three weeks' time.

TO THE PUZZLEMENT of many residents, on the morning of May 31, 1916, a German warplane had appeared in the skies over Jerusalem and proceeded to execute a series of tight circles just to the west of the walled Old City. Finally, a small weighted object was thrown from the plane that landed in the street directly in front of the Hotel Fast, the favored watering hole of German officers in Jerusalem. Upon closer inspection, the packet was found to be a bundled German flag with a note inside from Curt Prfer. He was returning to the city that evening, the note explained, and he wanted his cook to prepare a ”good dinner” for him. It was the sort of flamboyant act that Prfer probably never would have performed in his prior incarnation as a spy chief, but it was very much in keeping with the colorful antics of his new comrades in arms, the spotters and machine gunners and flying ”aces” of the German Fliegertruppen, or Flying Corps.

In preparation for a renewed Turco-German offensive against the Suez Ca.n.a.l, in the early spring of 1916 a new German air squadron had been brought down and based in Beersheva, at the eastern end of the Sinai Peninsula. Tiring of his propaganda and surveillance duties in Syria and eager to play an active role in the coming attack, Prfer had pet.i.tioned to be made an aerial spotter for Field Aviation Detachment 300.

The request was a somewhat puzzling one, given that Prfer had remained dubious about the wisdom of a second attempt on the Suez since having partic.i.p.ated in the first. As far back as August 1915, in a detailed report to the German amba.s.sador in Constantinople, he'd argued that for such an offensive to have even a minimal chance of success, it could not at all resemble Djemal's haphazard ”reconnaissance in force” of the previous February, but would require a ma.s.sive investment of manpower and resources: road- and railway-building crews, crack Turkish troops, German aircraft and officers and artillery. Of course, he pointed out, the very scale of that investment meant a multiplying of the logistical hurdles in keeping such a force supplied and fed and watered across the Sinai sands. Simultaneously, it rendered the notion of somehow catching the British by surprise ”unthinkable.” ”With all their war machines,” he wrote, ”you'd have to conduct a siege and bash their defenses with artillery before you could march into Egypt, after which you would need to maintain a line of supply from Palestine and Syria.”

But even if all this could be accomplished, Prfer had pointed out, capturing the ca.n.a.l just might not ultimately be very significant. After all, with the British navy in complete command of the seas, it wasn't as if the Suez would suddenly become useful to the Germans or Turks. As for the argument that cinching off this maritime shortcut would disrupt the flow of British territorial troops to Europe by forcing them to take the long way around Africa's Cape of Good Hope, this was certainly true, but the two- to three-week delay that would cause hardly rose above the level of inconvenience. To the German intelligence agent, the plans for a second Suez operation had seemed to underscore the old maxim that war can kill all things except bad ideas.

Against this, though, a powerful, personal lure had worked on him: Detachment 300, the ”glamour” of air war. In contrast to the hideous reality of life and death in the trenches, an aura of romance had instantly attached to this newest form of warfare, with the pilot aces of all sides transformed into newsreel heroes and matinee idols. Prfer, never much of a man's man, clearly reveled in being in the company of such bermenschen at Beersheva, and the months he spent with Detachment 300 were undoubtedly among the happiest of his life, a carefree time of late-night drinking sessions, or flying off to Jerusalem or Jaffa at a moment's notice to attend diplomatic receptions or social dances. There seemed to be an almost starstruck quality to it; in contrast to the scant details Prfer normally jotted in his wartime diary-when he bothered to keep it at all-he made careful note of the names of most all the Detachment 300 pilots for posterity. In the dropping of his note in front of the Hotel Fast to order up a meal, the soft-spoken former scholar was emulating the pranks of his new, larger-than-life comrades-and undoubtedly deriving considerable pride over his excellent aim.

Very shortly after that lark, however, had come news of the Arab Revolt in the Hejaz. Apparently forgetting his own oft-repeated a.s.sertion that the Arabs were too cowardly to ever rebel, Prfer's first response had been a certain smugness, remarking in his diary, ”I rightly warned them about the Sherif [Hussein].” As the revolt spread, however, and one Turkish garrison after another in Arabia came under siege, he remembered his old mentor, Max von Oppenheim, and the tremendous efforts the propaganda chief had made to forestall this day from coming. ”The situation in Arabia goes badly for the Turks,” he noted in early July. ”Poor Oppenheim!”

But Prfer had soon turned his attention back to more immediate concerns, as preparations got under way for the new Suez offensive. As an aerial spotter, he quite literally had a bird's-eye view when the Turkish vanguard launched its attack against the British railhead at Romani, some twenty-five miles east of the ca.n.a.l, on the morning of August 4, 1916. While that vantage point afforded him the opportunity to hurl a few bombs down on the enemy-bombs that in those early days of air combat were little more than large hand grenades-it also allowed him to grasp the full magnitude of the Turco-German defeat as it unfolded over the next two days.

Hoping to catch the British in a flanking move, the attacking force was instead caught out in the open and enveloped. By the afternoon of August 5, the Turkish army was in headlong retreat, having suffered some six thousand casualties, about one-third its total strength, and a toll that undoubtedly would have been higher if the British hadn't slowed their pursuit out of sheer exhaustion in the 120-degree heat.

The rout at Romani ended forever the Turco-German dream of ”liberating” Egypt. It also ended Prfer's four-month idyll with Detachment 300, for it forced him to finally acknowledge something he'd tried very hard to ignore: he was desperately ill. There had been terse little clues to it in his diary for some time-”I am unwell,” he had noted back in mid-May-but now, his face sunken and his weight down to little more than a hundred pounds, even his handwriting betrayed him; gone was his emphatic, jerky script, replaced by a trembling, barely legible scrawl. Diagnosed as suffering from both cholera and tuberculosis, he was placed on medical leave and shuttled back to Germany in early October. After several weeks' recuperation in a Berlin hospital, he began helping out in the mapping division of the Reserve General Staff on Wilhelmstra.s.se.

In that capacity, the arc of Curt Prfer's wartime experience completed a curious reverse symmetry with that of one of his adversaries in the field, British army captain T. E. Lawrence. During the first two years of the war, Lawrence had spent most of his time deskbound in the mapping room of the Arab Bureau in Cairo, while Curt Prfer seemed to be everywhere: launching sabotage and spying missions against British Egypt, partic.i.p.ating in two major offensives, unmasking potential enemies of the Ottoman and German cause throughout Syria. By the end of 1916, it was now Lawrence who was in the field as Prfer whiled away his days in a mapping room in Berlin.

And a most prosaic existence it was. By January 1917, with his medical leave in Germany extended, Prfer found himself battling with the local food rationing office in Berlin over his bread allotment. As he complained in cables to both his former colleagues in Constantinople and senior officials at the foreign ministry, without written confirmation of his leave extension, the Bread Commission was refusing to issue him the required ration card, and he beseeched their help in sorting out the problem as soon as possible. It was a very long way from dropping dinner orders out of airplanes.

Furthermore, there was the strong likelihood that it was with such mundane concerns that Curt Prfer's wartime career would end. With his congenitally frail health, the Orientalist had only been inducted into the German military back in 1914 through the intercession of Max von Oppenheim, and his health was obviously far more ravaged now. Once again, though, the self-proclaimed baron from Cologne would come to his protege's aid, offering Prfer an escape route from his semi-invalid duties in Berlin.

Having thus far failed to ignite a pan-Islamic jihad in the Middle East that would play to Germany's political and military benefit, Oppenheim, according to Prfer biographer Donald McKale, was now expanding his ambitions into the economic sphere. What he envisioned, in the wake of the coming Central Powers victory, was a vast German economic consortium that might dominate commerce and resource development throughout the region for decades to come. In the count's scheme, the vehicle for this domination was to be a unique partners.h.i.+p between the German government and the nation's private industrial conglomerates, the two working hand in glove for both personal and national interest. A man with a deep, perhaps exaggerated appreciation for the power of the printed word, Oppenheim worked up an alluring packet of brochures and prospectuses to dazzle German businessmen with visions of the wealth that could soon be theirs in the far-off lands of the Ottoman Empire.

As Oppenheim explained to would-be investors, nothing more exemplified the symbiotic relations.h.i.+p between public and private that he envisioned for the East than the role soon to be a.s.sumed by his young protege, Curt Prfer, in Constantinople. As the new head of the German intelligence bureau there, Prfer would also serve as the primary conduit for investors trying to navigate Turkey's bureaucratic shoals. German industrialists could hardly ask for a better friend; here was a man who not only knew the region and Young Turk power structure intimately, but had a proven record of getting things done by whatever creative means necessary.

Just as with his notion of anticolonial Islamic jihad, Max von Oppenheim's economic scheme would prove a bit ahead of its time, presaging as it did the so-called national corporatism model first successfully harnessed by Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini in the 1920s, and then to even more spectacular effect a decade later by Mussolini's protege, Adolf Hitler. For Curt Prfer in 1917, however, it simply meant a return to the field. In late February, he bid goodbye to his mapping-room colleagues in Berlin and set out for the Middle East once more.

FOR COLONEL eDOUARD BReMOND, watching Captain T. E. Lawrence come off the deck of HMS Suva in Jeddah harbor on December 12 must have been a particularly gladdening sight, something very much like revenge. Even if he'd yet to put together that Lawrence was the prime mover behind the rebuke he had received from the French War Ministry weeks earlier, Bremond most certainly now recognized him as a troublemaker, the man who more than any other British field officer had poisoned the well for sending Allied troops to Arabia. But now a rather different figure stood before the French colonel, one shorn of his arrogance and supreme self-a.s.surance. Lawrence was just coming in from Yenbo, where he had witnessed firsthand the pell-mell retreat of Faisal's forces before the advancing Turks, and the experience seemed to have stripped the irksome little captain of his romantic notions of the brave Arab warrior.

Perhaps it was the belief that they were finally on the same page, or perhaps Bremond couldn't resist the temptation to stick the knife in a little, but on the Jeddah dock he informed Lawrence that he was just then on his way to meet with Reginald Wingate in Khartoum. In light of the unfolding crisis on the Arabian coast, he intended to once again press for the dispatch of an Anglo-French force to Rabegh.

Lawrence had no doubt Bremond would find a receptive audience. Sure enough, on December 14, and with Colonel Bremond at his side, Wingate fired off another secret cable to the Foreign Office and General Murray in Cairo urging that a brigade be sent as soon as possible. ”I can see no alternative or practical means of a.s.sisting Arabs, and of saving Sherif's movement from collapse,” Wingate wrote. ”Sherif has cancelled his original application to us to dispatch European troops, but is [now] genuinely alarmed at situation and, in Colonel Bremond's opinion, with a little pressure would again ask for them.” The immediate question before them, Wingate argued, ”is whether we shall make a last attempt to save Sherif and his Arabs in spite of themselves.”

Except, unbeknownst to most everyone at that moment, the immediate crisis in western Arabia had actually already pa.s.sed. On the night of December 11, just hours after Lawrence left Yenbo on the Suva, a large Turkish force had approached the town, only to hesitate upon seeing the British s.h.i.+ps in the harbor, their searchlights illuminating the surrounding countryside as if in daylight. Apparently the Arabs' mortal fear of artillery was shared by the Turks, for this force soon turned back from Yenbo; within days, aerial reconnaissance showed it had retreated into the mountains, perhaps was even on its way back to Medina. While this development didn't necessarily mean an end of the Turkish threat to the coastal towns, it did create breathing s.p.a.ce-and breathing s.p.a.ce wasn't at all helpful to the two escalationists in Khartoum. In coming weeks, Wingate and Bremond would find several more occasions to press for intervention, but they had lost their last best chance with the Turkish withdrawal outside Yenbo.

Within several days of that threat pa.s.sing, a somewhat chastened Lawrence was back in Yenbo, trying to figure out with Faisal what might come next. They were aided in their planning by a rather momentous development in London. Just weeks earlier, the coalition government of Herbert Asquith had fallen, and been replaced by a new coalition government led by David Lloyd George. The new prime minister was determined to break with the ”Westerner” mind-set that had prevailed in London since the beginning of the war, which held that ultimate victory could only be achieved on the Western Front. That mind-set had led to the deaths of some 400,000 British soldiers by the end of 1916, with no end or breakthrough in sight. Instead, Lloyd George wanted to pursue an ”Easterner” policy, to try to ”knock out the props” of the enemy war machine by striking at its weakest spots. At least by comparison to the seemingly impregnable wall of the Western Front, that meant the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire.

Shortly after Lawrence's return to Yenbo, this new focus became evident in an increased British presence on the Hejazi coast-not the thousands of regulars hoped for by Wingate and Bremond, but rather an a.s.sortment of instructors and advisors tasked to transform the undisciplined Arab rebel bands into a credible fighting force. The most interesting of these expanded operations took place in Yenbo, the northernmost rebel-held port and now deemed relatively safe from Turkish attack. With the Hejaz Railway, the Turks' lifeline to their garrison in Medina, situated a mere ninety miles inland, the British envisioned using Yenbo as the staging ground for a committed campaign of sabotage attacks on the railroad, and to this end they brought in a colorful figure named Herbert Garland. A tall, rangy Scotsman, Garland had been a chemist before the war and by tinkering in the training grounds in Cairo had become a self-taught expert in blowing things up. In the few forays the Arabs had conducted against the Hejaz Railway prior to his arrival, they had simply torn up the tracks with picks and shovels, a very simple business to mend, and Garland now set about teaching them the fine art of placing an explosive charge beneath a rail in such a way as to mangle it beyond repair. In the doldrum rebuilding days at Yenbo of early January 1917, one of Major Garland's most attentive students was T. E. Lawrence.

But despite his dealings with Garland and the several other British advisors now setting up shop in the port town, there was something that set Lawrence quite apart from his countrymen. Part of it was obvious: his dress.

During Lawrence's visit to the Arab encampment in Nakhl Mubarak in early December, Faisal had suggested he dispense with his British army uniform in favor of Arab dress; that way, the British liaison officer could circulate through the camp and call upon Faisal at his leisure without drawing undue attention. Lawrence had taken to this suggestion with alacrity, donning the white robes and gold sas.h.i.+ng normally reserved for a senior sheikh. He had changed out of those robes during his brief run down the coast to Jeddah, but had immediately put them on again upon his return to Yenbo.

Yet he stood apart for far more than just his attire. Taking his temporary posting as Faisal's liaison very much to heart, Lawrence largely eschewed the British tent settlement at the water's edge to spend most of his time at the sprawling Arab encampment several miles inland. There, and with far more tolerance than most other British officers might reasonably muster, he set about adapting to the peculiar la.s.situde with which Faisal ran his ”army.”

The typical day started with a dawn wakeup call by an imam, then a leisurely breakfast where Faisal conferred with his senior aides and various tribal leaders. This was followed by a long morning stretch during which any man in the encampment could come to pet.i.tion Faisal over some concern or grievance; as Lawrence quickly noted, few of these audiences had any direct connection to the war effort. This open-house session only ended with the serving of lunch, often a two-hour affair attended by more aides and tribal leaders, after which Faisal might spend a couple of hours dictating messages to his scribes. That work done, it was more chitchat until an evening meal consumed at an even more languorous pace than the previous one. After that, more dictations by Faisal, more conversations with elders, the reading of reports from various scouting parties, an unhurried, undirected process that might stretch well past midnight-even right up to the imam's dawn call that signaled it was all about to start over again.

For a famously impatient and ascetic man like T. E. Lawrence, it must have been a kind of agony. In normal times, he was so indifferent to food and meals that his preference was to eat standing up and to finish in less than five minutes. Probably even more trying for a man who abhorred physical contact-he avoided even the shaking of hands if he could do so without offense-was the easy affection on constant display in the Arab camp, the endless embraces and kissing of cheeks, the casual holding of hands.

But Lawrence also recognized that this was the Arab way of war and peace. Faisal was not just a wartime leader, but a Hejazi chieftain, and the long, seemingly purposeless conversations were the glue that kept his fractious coalition together. In this culture, Faisal was not a general who issued orders-at least not to men not of his tribe-but a consensus builder compelled to cajole, counsel, and listen. Certainly, none of this was going to change to accommodate the Arabs' British advisors. To the contrary, Lawrence understood, it was he and his countrymen who had to adapt if they hoped to be accepted and effective. It was a pretty simple truism, but one that many of his colleagues, steeped in British notions of both military and cultural hierarchy, had a very hard time with.

Animating Lawrence's determination to adapt was the figure of Faisal ibn Hussein himself. Even in the darkest days of the revolt, when he had visited the Arabs' temporary refuge at Nakhl Mubarak, Lawrence had been struck by Faisal's unshaken ambition, a quality that had tempered his own pessimism over the situation. As he had reported to Gilbert Clayton on December 5, ”I heard [Faisal] address the head of one battalion last night before sending them out to an advanced position over the Turkish camp at Bir Said. He did not say much, no noise about it, but it was all exactly right and the people rushed over one another with joy to kiss his headrope when he finished. He has had a nasty knock in Zeid's retreat, and he realized perfectly well that it was the ruin of all his six months' work up here in the hills tying tribe to tribe and fixing each in its proper area. Yet he took it all in public as a joke, chaffing people on the way they had run away, jeering at them like children, but without in the least hurting their feelings, and making the others feel that nothing much had happened that could not be put right. He is magnificent, for to me privately he was most horribly cut up.”

Faisal had displayed that same spirit in Yenbo. On December 20, when it was clear the Turks were falling back toward Medina, he had beseeched his brother Ali to come north out of Rabegh with his army of some seven thousand, while Faisal took his own forces back up into the mountains; the hope was to catch the withdrawing Turks in a pincer movement. Alas, Ali proved no better a warrior leader than brother Zeid. Within days, his army had panicked and turned back for Rabegh on yet another erroneous rumor of a Turkish force ahead, and a disappointed Faisal saw no option but to return with his own men to Yenbo.

To most other British officers who observed the incident, it was another example of the inept.i.tude of the Arab forces, that at least twice now they had fled the field on the mere rumor of a Turkish presence. Lawrence saw things quite differently. Fresh from their recent rout in the mountains, the prudent course would have been for Faisal to keep his men under the protection of the British naval guns at Yenbo while they regrouped; instead, he had tried to leap to the offensive the moment an opportunity presented itself. It spoke of a determination in Faisal sorely lacking in his brothers.

In a similar vein, with both Rabegh and Yenbo now looking at least temporarily secure, Faisal returned to the idea of taking his campaign north and seizing the port town of Wejh. With Wejh in rebel hands, not only would the British supply line from Egypt be brought two hundred miles closer, but the easier terrain would allow for more frequent raids inland against the Hejaz Railway. Over long discussions with Lawrence, the two came up with a stripped-down version of Faisal's earlier plan, one that relied far less heavily on support from his now proven unreliable brothers.