In the two days he spent with Feisal before returning to Yenbo to help organize its defense, Lawrence had an opportunity to judge the strength and the weaknesses of Feisal’s forces. He used the Egyptian gunners, who, unlike the Arab tribesmen, did not consider themselves above menial labor, to clear an emergency landing strip for the RFC aircraft, and sat in on all of Feisal’s meetings with the disputatious tribal leaders, noting how Feisal gently led them to do what in any other army would be normal practice, such as posting a guard at night in exposed positions, or sending out patrols. It was an army without rules and without noncommissioned officers, in which each man had to have his say (often at length), and in which an enormous amount of time and patience had to be spent—wasted, in the eyes of most British officers—to accomplish anything.
It was also an army in which religion was ever-present, from the moment the imam climbed to the top of a little hill overlooking the camp before dawn and called the faithful for prayers to the last call for prayer at dusk—even though most of the men did not seem to Lawrence particularly religious. Feisal, for example, was casually observant, but not, it appeared, from any deep belief or interest; he simply felt obliged as a leader to set a good example. He was a chain-smoker, although tobacco was forbidden to Muslims; he had a certain amused contempt for the narrow-minded puritanism of his father’s desert rival ibn Saud and his Wahhabi followers, and no enthusiasm at all for his father’s efforts toreintroduce sharia law to Mecca in place of the secular Turkish legal code, which was based on France’s Code Napolйon. Religion among the tribesmen was simply a given, something they all shared; few of them, in fact, had ever met anyone who was not a Muslim. Drawing from this experience, Lawrence would write the “Twenty-Seven Articles,” as a guide for British officers working with the Arabs, a work so full of common sense and tolerance that it is still relevant today. What is extraordinary is how well Lawrence fitted into Feisal’s entourage and camp life without any attempt at disguising who he was. He shared the routine, the food, the harsh living conditions, the obligatory long-drawn-out exchange of compliments so alien to a westerner, living among them without complaint or special treatment, and always careful to ensure that he was never seen “advising” Feisal or, worse yet, contradicting him.
For all of Feisal’s superhuman calm and patience, it was clear to Lawrence that his position at Nakhl Mubarak was hazardous and exposed. It became even more critical when Feisal learned that a Turkish column had surprised his half brother Zeid and Zeid’s 800 tribesmen while they were preparing their morning coffee. Zeid had of course not bothered to post any guards or send out any patrols while he and his force slept, and they were now in full retreat, having abandoned much of their baggage and equipment, including their coffeepots. From everywhere came reports that the Turks were concentrating rapidly on Feisal’s position. Lawrence sent a messenger off to Yenbo asking the RFC to make a reconnaissance flight and determine where the Turks were and in what strength, and asked that an urgent message be telegraphed to “Ginger” Boyle for naval support. He then rode to Yenbo himself on “a magnificent bay camel” with an escort provided by Feisal. There, he found that the indefatigable and inventive Garland had already been preparing defensive positions, on the optimistic assumption that the Arabs would man them.
Lawrence himself does not seem to have made any such assumption. He had already reached the conclusion that while “man by man” the Arabs were good, “as a mass they are not formidable, since they have no corporate spirit or discipline, or mutual confidence.” His report to Clayton recommended using them in the smallest possible units, and keeping them busy by making raids on Turkish outposts and the railway, rather than letting them “sit still"; sitting still made them “get nervous, and anxious to return home,” a trait that Feisal himself shared. In short, Lawrence had already made up his mind that the Arabs needed to fight an altogether different kind of war—guerrilla warfare was, he thought, the best way to use them effectively. He was familiar with Colonel C. E. Call-well’s classic Small Wars, the British army’s bible on fighting guerrillas, in which Callwell, who had fought in the Boer War, wrote: “Guerrilla warfare is what the regular armies always have to dread, and when this is directed by a leader with a genius for war, an effective campaign becomes well-nigh impossible.”
Lawrence believed the very qualities that made the tribesmen such poor material for conventional warfare could help them defeat the Turks: swift mobility, hit-and-run tactics, a gift for long-range sniping, and a tradition of mounted raids that took an enemy by surprise, after which the raiders vanished back into the desert with their plunder. Fighting as guerrillas in small numbers they could deliver an endless series of pinpricks rather than a smashing blow, and over time the pinpricks might prove fatal for the enemy. As for the “leader with a genius for war,” there seems little doubt from Lawrence’s reports that he already saw himself in that role.
The next morning Lawrence was disagreeably surprised to learn that it was not just Zeid who had been defeated. Feisal and his army had clashed with the Turks too, in exactly the kind of conventional battle that Lawrence believed the Arabs should avoid, and had been badly beaten. Zeid’s sudden defection had exposed Feisal’s untrained and poorly organized tribesmen to a determined Turkish attack. Feisal tried to get his men to stand and fight at Nakhl Mubarak, but they were overcome by Turkish artillery, as well as by the fact that their antiquated guns (Lawrence called these guns “old rubbish” left over from the Boer War) proved not to have the range of the Turkish artillery—nor had they been supplied with sights, range tables, or even reliable ammunition. As a resultthe men of the Juheina tribe, on Feisal’s left, lost heart quickly and fled the battlefield. The Juheina would later claim that they had merely been tired and thirsty and had needed a coffee break, but in any case their flight led to the rapid collapse of the rest of Feisal’s line and a disorderly rout as the entire army raced back toward Yenbo and the protection of the British naval guns.
For a western army this would have been a disgrace, and would have been followed by severe disciplinary measures and perhaps courts-martial for the senior officers; but when Lawrence reached Feisal’s house in Yenbo, he found the emir and his commanders in a jolly mood, trading insults, and taunting Zeid in a good-natured way for the speed with which he and his men had run away from the battle. Zeid and his men were “quiet, but in no other way mortified by their shame,” Lawrence remarked; nor did Feisal seem dismayed by the collapse of his army in the face of only three battalions of Turks—in numbers, less than half the fighting men Feisal had. This incident fully justified Colonel Callwell’s firmly expressed opinion in Small Wars: “While all goes well, irregular forces hold together and obey their chiefs, but in the hour of trial the bonds which keep the mass intact are apt to snap, and then the whole dissolves and disappears.”