So began the adventure.
Lawrence traveled to Rabegh by ship with Storrs and Aziz el Masri, on a rusty, wallowing old tramp steamer; there they transferred to a more comfortable Indian liner anchored in the harbor. On board the liner they were joined by Emir Ali, the sharif’s eldest son, for three days of discussion in a comfortably carpeted tented enclosure on deck, during the course of which Ali repeated at great length the same requests for more gold, guns, and modern equipment that his brother had made at Jidda,but with less force and less humor. Closer to the fighting, his view of the situation was less optimistic than Abdulla’s—his brother Feisal, with the bulk of the Arab army, was about 100 miles to the northeast, encamped in the desert, still licking his wounds from the failure of the attack on Medina, and hoping, if possible, to prevent a Turkish advance on Mecca or Rabegh. Ali reported that “considerable” Turkish reinforcements were arriving in Medina from Maan, that the Arab army needed artillery like that of the Turks, and that his brother Feisal was hard pressed; but as Storrs was to note later, there was in fact no reliable means of passing intelligence from Feisal in the field to Ali in Rabegh or from there to Jidda and Mecca, let alone anybody to assess the reliability of the information, and act on it.
Lawrence liked Ali at once, in fact “took a great fancy” to him and praised his dignified good manners, but at the same time reached the conclusion that Ali was too bookish, lacked “force of character,” and had neither the health nor the ambition to be the “prophet” Lawrence was looking for. As for Ali, he was “staggered” by his father’s instruction to send Lawrence up-country, but once having expressed his doubts about the wisdom of it, he gave in gracefully. To all Sharif Hussein’s sons, their father’s word was law. By the time Storrs departed on the same hideous, crowded tramp steamer that had brought them—it had no refrigerator, electric lights, or radio, and on board the principal food was tinned tripe—for the long, slow return journey to Suez, often into a “very fierce” gale, Lawrence’s arrangements were already made. Ali had graciously offered Lawrence his own “splendid riding camel,” complete with his own beautiful, highly decorated saddle and its elaborate trappings, and had chosen, to accompany Lawrence, a reliable tribesman, Obeid el Raashid, together with Obeid’s son. Years later, Storrs could still remember the sight of Lawrence standing on the shore in the pitiless sun, “waving grateful hands” as Storrs’s tramp steamer raised anchor.
Lawrence’s decision to travel into the interior of the Hejaz was undertaken at a critical moment for the Arab Revolt. Ever since June 1916, when Sharif Hussein, after much hesitation and endless bargaining with the British, had finally made the decision to rebel against the Turkish government, he had relied on two separate forces. The first force (usually referred to as “the regulars”) consisted of Arab prisoners of war or deserters from the Turkish army, more or less disciplined and uniformed, and commanded by Arabs who for the most part had been officers in the Turkish army. Of these officers, the two most prominent for the moment were Aziz el Masri, an experienced professional soldier who was the sharif’s chief of staff; and Nuri as-Said, an Arab nationalist from Baghdad who was both a political and a military workhorse. The second, and much larger and more colorful, armed force was drawn from those Bedouin tribes that had been moved by British gold, the hope of plunder, loyalty, or blood ties (however slender) to the sharif of Mecca—or, more rarely, by nascent Arab nationalism—to join in the struggle. Some of these Bedouin were under the more or less lackadaisical command of Emir Ali at Rabegh, but the majority were under the command of Ali’s younger and more inspiring brother, Emir Feisal. Since the beginning of the revolt the British had contributed quantities of small arms and gold sovereigns (the Arabs, from the sharif himself down to the lowliest tribesman, would do nothing without advance payment in gold), machine guns, ammunition, naval support, food supplies, and military advice, without much to show for it so far, except the sharif’s refusal to join the jihad. Sharif Hussein had managed to capture and hold on to Mecca, and after a siege had taken nearby Taif. But the Arab attack on Medina, the last station on the railway line from Damascus, 280 miles to the north of Mecca, had failed dismally; the Arabs were driven back by the steady discipline of the entrenched Turks and by well-sited modern artillery.
Medina had made it apparent that the Bedouin levies were unprepared for modern warfare, and easily panicked by modern weapons like artillery and airplanes; nor did they lend themselves to the discipline and organization of a modern army. If they obeyed anyone, the men obeyed their tribal leader, or sheikh, and all the men were equal—they had no concept of a chain of command, no such thing as noncommissionedofficers, and no understanding of Kadavergehorsam,* the reflexive obedience to an order that was pounded into trained infantry on the parade ground in every army in Europe. Since their primary loyalty was to tribe, clan, and family, the heavy casualties of modern warfare were unacceptable to the tribesmen—they were brave enough, and could be inspired (though never ordered) to perform daring acts; but each death in their ranks was a grievous personal loss, not a statistic, and they came and went as they pleased. If a man felt the need to go home and tend to his camels or goats, he would leave and perhaps send back a son or a brother with his rifle to take his place. It was not, in brief, an army that could stand up to the Turks on equal terms in sustained attack on fixed positions; nor was it an army that British officers understood or trusted.
Since the British were paying for the Arab armies by the head, there was also a natural tendency on the part of Sharif Hussein and his sons to inflate the number of their troops, aggravated by the Arabic tendency to use the word “thousands” as a synonym for “many"; thus to this day the number of Arabs actually fighting in the revolt is unclear. Hussein claimed he had 50,000 fighters but admitted that only about 10,000 of them were armed; the Arab “regulars” may have numbered 5,000. Feisal’s army in 1917 consisted of about 5,000 men mounted on camels, and another 5,000 on foot. (A good many of these men on foot may have been unarmed servants, or slaves, for slaves, mostly blacks from the Sudan, were still commonplace throughout Arabia; indeed there was a rumor that one member of the French mission to Jidda had bought une jeune nйgresse, or a fair-skinned Circassian, “for a very reasonable price.”) In the Hejaz the Arabs certainly outnumbered the Turks, of whom there were about 15,000; but the Turks were by comparison a disciplined, modern force, with trained NCOs and an officer corps (aided by German and Austro-Hungarian advisers and military specialists), for the most part holding well-fortified strongpoints—a position not so very different (terrain and climate apart) from that of the U.S. Army in Vietnam.
Two keys to warfare in the region were the single-line Hejaz railway, the vital supply line connecting Medina to Damascus; and the location of wells, which determined the line of any advance in the desert.
A third and most indispensable key—and the only one over which the British had any direct control—consisted of the ports along the Red Sea, which rose like the rungs of a ladder one by one up the coast of the Hejaz from Jidda in the south to Aqaba in the north. Rabegh, which was in British hands, was about seventy-five miles north of Jidda by sea; Yenbo, more precariously in Arab hands, about 100 miles north of Rabegh; Wejh (still in Turkish hands) about 200 miles north of Rabegh; and Aqaba nearly 300 miles north of Wejh. Inland, past Aqaba to Yenbo, the Hejaz railway ran about fifty miles distant from and more or less parallel to the coastline behind a formidable barrier of rugged mountains, until it ended in Medina. This configuration made the railway vulnerable to small parties who knew their way through the mountains, but also meant that the Turks had the means to quickly transfer troops from Medina or from Maan to threaten any of the ports held by the British and the Arabs. It was the guns of British warships that made such an attack risky; and the support of the Royal Navy (as well its ability to bring in a constant stream of supplies, equipment, and gold) was the major factor keeping the Arab Revolt alive.