For Storrs, the journey to Jidda—it was his third—however tedious and hot, was part of his job; the notion of an Arab revolt against the Turks had been an idйe fixe with British strategists in the Middle East since long before the war. Indeed Kitchener and Storrs had discussed the possibility with Emir (Prince) Abdulla—one of the sons of Hussein, sharif and emir of Mecca—before it was even certain that Turkey would join the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians against the British, the French, and the Russians. In October 1914, three months after war had broken out, and only a few days after Turkey had finally (and fatally) joined the Central Powers, Kitchener sent a grandiloquent message to Sharif Hussein from London, with an open proposal to back an Arab revolt: “Till now we have defended and befriended Islam in the person of the Turks: henceforth it shall be in that of the noble Arab. It may be that an Arab of true race will assume the Caliphate at Mecca or Medina, and so good may come by the help of God out of all the evil which is now occurring.”
This pious hope, fortified by Kitchener’s tactfully phrased suggestion that with British help and support the sharif might replace the sultan of Turkey as caliph, the spiritual leader of Islam, eventually led both to a revolt, so far mostly sporadic and unsuccessful, and to spirited bargaining, in which Storrs was one of the chief players—hence, his sea voyage to a place where Christians, even when bearing gifts, or the promise thereof, were still regarded as infidels. The Hejaz, the mountainous coastal region of Arabia bordering the Red Sea, contained two of the three holiest cities of Islam: Mecca and Medina. (The third, soon to be a source of serious disagreement between the British and the Arabs, and later of course between the Jews and the Arabs, is Jerusalem.) It was only with great reluctance that the Arabs had allowed the British to open a consulate in Jidda (the Union Jack flying there was a particular grievance, since it consists of a cross in three different forms), and on the occasions when it was necessary for the sharif’s sons to meet with an Englishman, they rode down from Mecca to Jidda, a distance of about forty-five miles, to do so. Mecca was, and remains today, a city closed to infidels. As for their father,the sharif preferred to remain in Mecca whenever possible, communicating with his British ally by long, opaque, and often bewildering letters in Arabic, and from time to time by telephone to Jidda, for surprisingly there was a telephone system in the holy city; his own number was, very appropriately, Mecca 1.
After a walk from the harbor through the fly-infested open stalls of the food market in the oppressive heat, Storrs and Lawrence were happy enough to be shown into a shaded room in the British consulate, where they were awaited by the British representative in Jidda, Lieutenant-Colonel Cyril Wilson, who disliked both his visitors: he did not trust Storrs, and he had argued with Lawrence in Cairo about the appropriateness of British officers’ wearing Arab clothing. “Lawrence wants kicking and kicking hard at that,” Wilson wrote, adding, “He was a bumptious young ass,” though Wilson would soon change his mind, and become one of Lawrence’s supporters. Lawrence’s opinion of Wilson, though he would tone it down in later years when writing Seven Pillars of Wisdom, was at first equally critical—critical enough so that Storrs prudently censored it out of his account of the meeting. Part of Wilson’s resentment at Lawrence’s presence was that it was unclear to him what Lawrence was doing there; the rest no doubt was a result of Lawrence’s personality, which older and more conventional officers found trying at the best of times.
In fact Lawrence’s presence was not, as he later suggested, “a holiday and a joy-ride,” a pleasant way of using up a few days of leave sightseeing in the congenial company of Storrs. Management and control of the Arab Revolt were shared among a bewildering number of rival agencies and personalities, each with its own policy: the British high commissioner in Egypt, the commander in chief of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, and the Arab Bureau, in Cairo; military intelligence in Ismailia, halfway between Port Said and Suez; the War Office, the Foreign Office, and the Colonial Office, in London; the government of India, in Delhi (the largest body of Muslims in the world was in India and what is now Pakistan); and the governor-general of the Sudan, in Khartoum, since the shortestsupply route to the Hejaz was across the narrow Red Sea, from Port Sudan to Jidda. Colonel Wilson was, in fact, the representative in Jidda of a larger-than-life imperial figure, General Sir Reginald Wingate Pasha, GCB, GCVO, GBE, KCMG, DSO, the fiery governor-general of the Sudan, an old and experienced Arab hand who had fought under Kitchener and had known Gordon of Khartoum. Storrs, a diplomat, was the adviser of Sir Henry McMahon, the high commissioner of Egypt. Lawrence’s immediate superior was Brigadier-General Gilbert Clayton, who, like Wingate and Storrs, was another of Kitchener’s devoted disciples. Until recently Clayton had been serving as director of all military intelligence in Egypt, and as Wingate’s liaison with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force and chief of the newly formed Arab Bureau.
Lawrence admired Clayton, and would later describe him as “like water, or permeating oil, soaking silently and insistently through everything,” which is probably the best description of how an intelligence chief ought to operate. Clayton appears to have had no great confidence in the ability of Storrs, a mere civil servant, to judge men and events, especially in the military sphere; but he had come to respect Lawrence’s judgment, and to rely on his well-informed reports about affairs in the Ottoman Empire. It was not therefore Storrs who was “babysitting” Lawrence, but Lawrence who was babysitting Storrs, though Storrs may not at first have realized the fact.
Given the number of conflicting agencies involved in the Arab Revolt, it is hardly surprising that British policy was inconsistent. Most of the older members of the war cabinet in London were, or had been, by instinct and habit Turcophiles; for throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries support for the Ottoman Empire—however devious, corrupt, and incompetent the sultans may have been—was a cornerstone of British foreign policy. Turkey was the indispensable buffer between imperial Russia and the Mediterranean—Russia’s undisguised ambition to seize Constantinople and dominate the Near East and the Balkans concerned British statesmen almost as much as its relentless advance south toward Afghanistan. In the west, Russia’s ambition would threatenthe Suez Canal; in the south it threatened India, still the “jewel in the crown,” the largest and most valuable of British colonial possessions. Hence, propping up Turkey, the “sick man of Europe,” as Czar Nicholas I* is said to have referred to the Ottoman Empire, was thought to be a vital British interest. Those who still believed this—and there were many—were not well pleased by the fact that bumbling diplomacy on the part of Great Britain in 1914, and greed and duplicity on the part of Turkey, had brought Turkey into the war on the side of the Central Powers, while Russia was now an ally of the British. Enthusiasm for an Arab revolt was, as a result, always equivocal in London, while in Delhi there was outright opposition and obstructionism for fear that a successful Arab revolt would inspire similar ambitions among the hundreds of millions of Muslims in India. Support for an Arab revolt centered on the powerful figure of Field Marshal Kitchener until his death at sea in June 1916, but survived among those of his acolytes who remained in the Middle East, and also a few powerful political figures in London, particularly David Lloyd George, who had replaced Kitchener as secretary of state for war and would shortly replace an exhausted Asquith as prime minister. The actual Arab Revolt had been going on since the summer of 1916, but Storrs, who was deeply involved in the diplomatic side, was not alone in criticizing the “incoherent and spasmodic” quality of the leadership to date, or in longing for “a supreme and independent control of the campaign,” which he had hoped to find in Aziz Ali Bey el Masri, Sharif Hussein’s chief of staff.