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 leadership 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 leadership 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 ships 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 ships 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 partnership 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 relationship 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 ships 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 sashing 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.

But planning that advance must have been a bittersweet exercise for Lawrence. As he well knew, his time in Arabia was rapidly drawing to a close. Despite a series of delays in Europe, Stewart Newcombe would soon be on his way to take up his permanent position with Faisal, and Lawrence bundled back to his desk job at the Arab Bureau.

It was a fate he had tried to forestall through a campaign of quiet subversion ever since returning to the Hejaz. A chief target of that campaign had been his temporary field supervisor, Lieutenant Colonel Cyril Wilson. Quite aware of Wilson's fierce opposition to even his temporary posting in Arabia, Lawrence had sought to sidestep the resident agent in Jeddah by playing directly to the higher powers in Cairo. That scheme had started with his very first cable back to Gilbert Clayton on December 5. "One of the things not fixed when I came down here," Lawrence wrote, "was my [supervisory] chief, and my manner of reporting. It is probably through Colonel Wilson, but as there is a post going to Egypt tonight I am sending this direct."

In fact, it had been made perfectly clear to Lawrence that Wilson was his chief in the field, so his confusion on this point was more than a little disingenuous. It established a precedent, however, one that Lawrence soon reemployed when Wilson tried to clip his wings by appointing him to the lowly post of supply officer in Yenbo. In protesting this a.s.signment to Clayton-"I regard myself as primarily an Intelligence Officer, or liaison with Faisal"-Lawrence also thought to explain that he was sending his latest reports to Cairo, rather than routing them through Wilson, because "if they are to be any good at all they should reach you within a reasonable period of dispatch-and to send them to Jeddah is only [the] waste of a week or ten days." That rationale would have lost some of its persuasiveness had it been known that Lawrence was actually on a ship en route to Jeddah when he wrote it.

As December wore on, his campaign became only more overt. Not for Lawrence any beseeching pleas for reconsideration; instead, he a.s.sumed the posture that his continuing on in Arabia was a foregone conclusion. "If I am to stay here," he wrote Clayton's deputy at the end of the month, once again sidestepping Wilson, "I will need all sorts of things. Have you any news of Newcombe? The situation is so interesting that I think I will fail to come back. I want to rub off my British habits and go off with Faisal for a bit." As if that desire was somehow already a part of his government's planning, Lawrence then laid out his intentions. "When I have someone to take over here from me, I'll go off. Wadi Ais is the unknown area of N. Hejaz, and I want to drop up and see it, [and] anything behind Rudhwa will be worth while."

IT WAS LESS a failed regime, perhaps, than a fantastically deluded one. Across the breadth of Syria by the close of 1916, an estimated half-million people had already died of starvation or disease, and conditions appeared slated to only grow worse in the new year. On the military front, Turkish forces had been thrown back from the Suez Ca.n.a.l anew, the garrison in Medina was one of the last holdouts against the Arab rebels in the Hejaz, and the British were once again marching up the Tigris toward Baghdad. Yet in his governor's mansions in Jerusalem and Damascus, Djemal Pasha continued to pore over blueprints for new ca.n.a.lworks and roadways, continued to attend ribbon-cutting ceremonies for the inauguration of schools and hospitals. It was as if he clung more tenaciously to his self-image as a progressive reformer because of the cascade of ruin all around him rather than in spite of it.

Perhaps one reason was that the Syrian governor was becoming ever more divorced from the power elites in Constantinople. In the Ottoman capital, the criticisms of Djemal had reached new heights with the outbreak of the Arab Revolt, but in what was now an established pattern, those criticisms ran the gamut from his having been too harsh-a common view, one embraced by most historians, was that his executions of the Arab nationalist leaders had provoked the rebellion-to his being far too lenient. To this latter charge, Djemal's penchant for glibness didn't help his cause; when Julius Loytved-Hardegg, the German consul in Damascus, asked whatever had possessed him to allow Faisal ibn Hussein to leave for Arabia on the eve of the revolt, Djemal replied that he'd done it to test Faisal's true colors. As Loytved-Hardegg acerbically noted in his report of the meeting, "the present time doesn't seem especially appropriate" for such a test.

Also irritating to Constantinople was Djemal's curious streak of courtliness toward Europeans in general, and the French in particular, as evidenced by his continuing to allow many of these "belligerent nationals" to stay on in Syria without restriction. A notable exception to his Europhilia was the European nation to which his government was militarily allied; Djemal loathed most everything about Germany and its culture, and could be quite expansive in enumerating its deficiencies to anyone within earshot.

As the war ground on, however, and Frenchmen became a rarer commodity in Syria-thanks in no small part to the ferreting-out skills of German agents like Curt Prfer-the governor seemed to transfer his affections to a different expatriate community, the Americans. To the cloistered faithful of the American Colony, a conservative religious sect that had established itself in Jerusalem in the 1890s, Djemal was a frequent and welcome guest; surviving photographs show Colony children crawling over Djemal's lap, much to his evident delight. Similarly, Howard Bliss, the president of the Syrian Protestant College (later the American University of Beirut), was so grateful for Djemal's support of the inst.i.tution, ensuring that it received subsidized food shipments in the midst of the Lebanon famine, that in late January 1917 he invited the governor to be the university's commencement speaker.

At that time, the U.S. consul in Damascus, Samuel Edelman, was having his own rather odd experience with Djemal, one that began with his answering a summons to the governor's Damascus office on January 20. For some months, Edelman had been trying to arrange the safe pa.s.sage from Syria of some five hundred American citizens eager to escape the worsening conditions, but his efforts had been stymied by Ottoman authorities. Certainly not helping matters was the recent reelection of Woodrow Wilson as president. Despite the campaign slogan that had helped carry him to reelection-"He kept us out of the war"-there were growing signs that Wilson intended to bring the United States in on the side of the Allies, and Constantinople was understandably loath to release hundreds of foreigners with firsthand knowledge of the situation in Syria, and whose government might soon join the enemy camp. In his meeting with Edelman on January 20, Djemal offered a novel solution. As the nonplussed consul cabled to his emba.s.sy in Constantinople, Djemal would now agree to let the five hundred Americans leave so long as they gave their word of honor "not to discuss Ottoman affairs until the end of war." Not surprisingly, American diplomats swiftly agreed to these patently unenforceable terms and set about arranging the departure of their citizens from Syria.

But it wasn't as if Djemal was compliant to the entreaties of all Americans. One who didn't get his way in one particular incident was the Standard Oil representative in Syria, William Yale.

Despite the steadily worsening conditions in Jerusalem, the American oilman had proven himself supremely adaptable to his surroundings. With the Turkish currency collapsed in value and speculators subject to hanging, Yale had embarked on a complicated black-market scheme that involved the buying and reselling of gold and paper scrip in different towns across Palestine that, after expenses, netted him a tidy 10 percent profit. On one occasion, when the governor of Jerusalem had balked at renewing Socony's concessionary permits, Yale had blackmailed the man by threatening to denounce him to the Young Turk leadership in Constantinople, as well as to inform the governor's wife of his illicit love affair.

Yale's special appeal to Djemal Pasha came in the autumn of 1916, and it arose when a trusted-or perhaps bribed-censor at the telegraph office in Jerusalem came to Yale and his business partner, Ismail Hakki Bey, with disturbing news. According to the censor, Djemal had just received an anonymous letter accusing Ismail Bey of belonging to a revolutionary group with ties to the Arab Revolt leader, Faisal Hussein. Further, the letter stated that "a young American was financing the group," a clear reference to Yale.

Since such an accusation, if believed, was tantamount to a death sentence, the two men rushed to Djemal's office at the German Hospice and demanded to see the letter. To their profound shock, they recognized the handwriting as that of Selim Ayoub, one of the other two Jerusalem businessmen involved in the Kornub oil concessions. "Ismail Bey and I were so angry at the man's underhanded, unscrupulous action," Yale recalled, "we demanded that he and his whole family be exiled."

In his memoir, Yale professed to have been on "intimate, friendly terms" with Ayoub and his family, and he surely knew what such a banishment would mean to the man's wife and children: utter dest.i.tution in the best of circ.u.mstances, slow death from disease or starvation in the worst. Yale also seemed to have rather forgotten that he'd threatened Ismail Bey with a very similar charge the year before. In any event, Djemal refused to give the aggrieved oilmen full satisfaction; while agreeing to send Selim Ayoub into exile, he decreed that the rest of the Ayoub family could remain in Jerusalem. With twenty years' distance on the event, Yale would note in his memoirs, "I am glad that Djemal acted less cruelly than the rest of us."

THE MARCH ON Wejh began at an oasis village northeast of Yenbo, and in wondrously exotic fashion. To Lawrence, the scene was both splendid and barbaric, as if the medieval histories he had devoured as a child had suddenly come to life. "Faisal in front, in white," he wrote. "[Chieftain] Sharraf on his right, in red headcloth and henna-dyed tunic and cloak, myself on his left in white and red. Behind us 3 banners of purple silk with gold spikes, behind them 3 drummers playing a march, and behind them a wild bouncing ma.s.s of 1,200 camels of the bodyguard, all packed as closely as they could move, the men in every variety of colored clothes and the camels nearly as brilliant in their trappings-and the whole crowd singing at the tops of their voices a war song in honor of Faisal and his family! It looked like a river of camels, for we filled up the wadi to the tops of its banks, and poured along in a quarter-of-a-mile long stream."

For Lawrence, this entrancing spectacle was to be very short-lived. Despite all his maneuverings of the past month, earlier that morning a cable had arrived in Yenbo announcing that Stewart Newcombe was finally on his way from Egypt; Lawrence was instructed to wait in Yenbo for his replacement's arrival, at which point his posting in Arabia would come to an end. As a result, after accompanying the grand cavalcade north for a mere hour or so, Lawrence had no choice but to bid Faisal farewell and return to the coast.

But there was to be no handover of authority in Yenbo. Instead, with Newcombe encountering another last-minute delay in Cairo, it was decided the two officers would meet up in the small rebel-held port of Um Lejj, halfway along the coast to Wejh, where they could intercept Faisal's army as it moved north. Accordingly, on January 14, Lawrence hopped on HMS Suva and made the short run up to Um Lejj and a reunion with Faisal. With the rebel force pausing there to reprovision, it was a fleeting reminder to Lawrence of both the adventure he'd had over the previous six weeks and of all he was about to miss. "I wish I had not to go back to Egypt," he wistfully wrote his family from Um Lejj on January 16. "Anyway, I have had a change."

Except there was still no word of Newcombe. By the seventeenth, and with the rebel march scheduled to resume the next morning, Lawrence quietly entertained the hope that perhaps his superior still might not make it in time, in which case he would have "no choice" but to accompany Faisal on to Wejh. By that evening, and with still no sign of Newcombe, Lawrence's hopes seemed realized; leaving a note for Newcombe in Um Lejj-"So I miss you by a day!"-he raced out to the desert to rejoin Faisal.

In fact, it was by considerably less than a day. No sooner had the Arab army broken camp that morning, Lawrence happily ensconced alongside Faisal, than two hors.e.m.e.n appeared coming from Um Lejj at a full gallop. One of them was Newcombe, finally arrived to take up his position as head of the British military mission to the Hejaz.

By instruction, Lawrence was to now return to Um Lejj and board the next ship for Cairo. On the spur of the moment, however, Stewart Newcombe decided on a different plan. This handover was far too rushed, and while he'd no doubt stumble his way to a familiarity with Faisal and his chief lieutenants during the continuing trek to Wejh, that process might be greatly eased if his stand-in of the past six weeks remained on hand to make the introductions. When Newcombe suggested this alternative to Lawrence, he encountered no resistance.

DURING HIS LONG and dreary days of waiting in London, Aaron Aaronsohn had fixed his gaze on Cairo, the place where he imagined British inertia might finally be overcome. It wasn't quite working out that way. "A hundred times daily I curse the moment when we decided to work with them," he raged in his diary on January 5, 1917. "Better for us to stagnate with the Turks and keep our illusions about the Allies than to approach them and see this hopeless incompetency. If the Boches [Germans] are finally beaten by these kakers they will have reason to doubt G.o.d and Justice."

Aaronsohn had arrived in Port Said in mid-December with the intention of immediately proceeding to Cairo to present his letters of introduction to Gilbert Clayton at the Arab Bureau. Instead, the British authorities meeting his ship had been more impressed by his dubious legal status-he was still a citizen of the Ottoman Empire-and had quarantined him in Alexandria. Shortly afterward, a young captain from the Eastern Mediterranean Special Intelligence Bureau (EMSIB), William Edmonds, showed up with the news that he was to serve as Aaronsohn's liaison.

The agronomist's initial high opinion of Edmonds-"not only very intelligent but very shrewd as well"-rapidly diminished when it became clear the intelligence agent's function was more to mollify Aaronsohn with the appearance of progress than to actually liaise him to anyone of substance. An indication of where Aaronsohn stood in the larger scheme of things was revealed when he inquired into the possibility of being reimbursed for some of the expenses he'd incurred in reaching London and then coming on to Egypt, a cost he estimated at about 1,500. Edmonds blanched at the figure; with the miserliness with which British officialdom was already infamous, he pointed out that no expenses could be reimbursed without proper receipts, and instead proposed placing Aaronsohn on a stipend of 1 a day, a sum that didn't even cover his Alexandria hotel bill. The proud scientist immediately refused.

"Until now," he vented in his diary that night, "I have encountered nothing but distrust and reticence, smallness and pettiness. I must try and control my nerves so that I can establish another connection with Absa," he wrote, referring to Absalom Feinberg, the deputy he had left behind in Athlit. "Then, he can continue the work if he wants to. So far as I am concerned, I have had enough of it. I am not going to continue working under such conditions."

Driving Aaronsohn's pique was that he'd heard nothing of what might be happening in Palestine for the past eight months. His whole purpose in coming to Egypt had been to finally link the British with his spy network in Athlit, and instead he was wasting his time quibbling about receipts and meeting with low-level functionaries.

What the scientist didn't appreciate was that he still wasn't fully trusted. Just as with the intelligence a.n.a.lyst back in London who'd concluded that Aaronsohn's information was so accurate it might indicate he was really a Turkish spy, so that a.n.a.lyst's counterparts in Cairo were grappling with the conundrum that this suspicion posed: how to link up with Aaronsohn's spy network, should it actually exist, while simultaneously blocking him from making contact with his Turkish counterintelligence handlers, if that was his true game? Aaronsohn may have unwittingly added to these doubts by repeatedly asking to talk with the intelligence officer that Absalom Feinberg had made contact with in 1915, Leonard Woolley. His British handlers were very slow to inform Aaronsohn that Woolley was now a Turkish captive, his ship having been torpedoed in the Gulf of Alexandretta over the summer, and Aaronsohn's constant invoking of Woolley's name in the absence of that information surely raised more eyebrows.

Shortly before Christmas, the British thought they'd come up with a clever way around their dilemma. Edmonds informed Aaronsohn that, at long last, a spy ship was being dispatched to make contact with Athlit; might Aaronsohn care to send along a personal message? The agronomist saw through the ploy at once and flew into one of his trademark tempers. Unless he went on the boat personally, he told Edmonds, he'd simply end all relations then and there; far better that than allowing the British to send in "some blunderer" who might get all his people killed.

In the face of this ultimatum, a compromise was reached: Aaronsohn could go along on the boat, but would not be allowed ash.o.r.e. In his stead, couriers would be sent in on a launch under the cover of darkness carrying instructions from him, as well as some of his small personal items that his confederates might recognize, thus convincing them the instructions were genuine. Allowing sufficient time for contact to be made, the launch would then go back in to retrieve the couriers off the beach. Time would be short, however, since the spy ship obviously needed to be well over the horizon and gone from sight before sunrise.

As at most every other stage of this star-crossed venture, now entering its seventeenth month, there was to be a snag. With Aaronsohn on board, the spy ship, a small converted trawler named the Goeland, slipped out of Port Said on Christmas Eve, and reached the coast off Athlit by the following afternoon. Aaronsohn made out someone waving a black cloth from the second-floor balcony of the research station, an identification that might have been more definitive had anyone on the ship's crew thought to bring along a decent pair of binoculars. Waiting for the cover of nightfall to make contact, the Goeland then headed out to the open sea, only to sail directly into a strong squall, a typical occurrence in the eastern Mediterranean at that time of year. Consequently, it was nearly 2 a.m. before the seas had calmed enough to allow it to return to Athlit and release the launch with the two couriers on board, one carrying Aaronsohn's instructions to his conspirators, the other his monogrammed penknife and special magnifying gla.s.s. No sooner had the launch disappeared into the darkness than the storm kicked back up.

Within the hour, the launch returned with troubling news. With the surf too rough to make a beach landing, the couriers had been instructed to swim the last little distance to sh.o.r.e. And with dawn fast approaching-already they could see a bivouac fire to the north, presumably that of a Turkish sh.o.r.e patrol-there was now no time to go back in to collect them; the couriers would have to fend for themselves. Throttling up its engines, the Goeland headed out to open waters once more. For Aaronsohn, it was one more maddening experience to join all the others; he had at last glimpsed Athlit again, but had no way of knowing for certain if successful contact had been made.

His mood improved when in early January he was finally permitted to leave Alexandria for Cairo. Taking a room at the Continental Hotel, he made the rounds of the different officials in the Arab Bureau, and at last began finding a receptive audience. Chief among these was another aristocratic Amateur and member of Parliament, a thirty-one-year-old Oxford graduate recently arrived in Cairo named William Ormsby-Gore. If not quite up to Mark Sykes's overachiever status, Ormsby-Gore was also a great dabbler over an eclectic array of interests, including the notion of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine-a cause with special resonance since he had recently converted to Judaism. In the months ahead, he and Sykes would emerge as two of the most important figures in the British power structure pushing for the creation of such a Jewish homeland, and one of their primary vehicles in furthering that cause would be Aaron Aaronsohn.

In the meantime, though, Ormsby-Gore sought to bolster the agronomist's flagging spirits however he could. Under his urging, another spy ship was sent to make contact with Athlit in mid-January; alas, this mission, too, ran into bad weather, and was aborted even before the Palestine coast had been reached. Ormsby-Gore also pa.s.sed Aaronsohn along to two other members of the Arab Bureau, Philip Graves and Major Windham Deedes, who shared the MP's belief in the enormous benefits that might be derived by activating the scientist's intelligence network. These sympathizers managed to insert a portion of an Aaronsohn report on the Jewish colonies in Palestine into the Arab Bulletin, including the pointed comment that the Zionists' greatest desire was "for autonomy through the benevolence of a friendly protecting power," marking one of the very few times a non-British correspondent gained a hearing in the intelligence compendium. Still, it reflected how far the agronomist remained from the inner circle of power in Cairo that he could imagine Windham Deedes as being "in charge of the Intelligence Service," as he noted in his diary, rather than cued to his true status as a mere midlevel a.n.a.lyst.

Slowly but surely, then, Aaronsohn finally began making some headway, but as he well knew, "slowly" was his enemy. That became manifestly clear on January 25. As he was returning to his room at the Continental Hotel that afternoon, he spotted his erstwhile liaison, Captain Edmonds, lounging near the staircase; he noted that the young officer seemed "mysterious in att.i.tude."

"You are the very man I am looking for," Edmonds said. "You must go immediately to Port Said. One of your men came across the desert." It was shocking news to Aaronsohn, but, true to form, Edmonds refused to provide any details other than the man's name: Joseph Lishansky.

"Is he wounded I wonder?" Aaronsohn wrote in his diary before rushing off to Port Said. "Why do they send me to him instead of sending him here? These gentlemen are so uselessly and so unfortunately mysterious!"

As he discovered in Port Said, his apprehensions were exactly right-Lishansky was wounded-but the story got much worse from there. Having despaired of ever hearing from Aaronsohn, and with the situation in Palestine growing ever more bleak, in mid-December Lishansky and Absalom Feinberg had decided to make another attempt to reach Egypt overland; in a cruel twist of fate, they had set off from Athlit just days before the Goeland couriers had come ash.o.r.e with Aaronsohn's instructions. After a harrowing journey across the Sinai no-man's-land, the two men had been nearly to the British lines when they were spotted by a band of Bedouin raiders. In the ensuing gunfight, Lishansky escaped with relatively minor wounds, but Feinberg had been shot in the back and was presumably dead.

The news shattered Aaronsohn; Feinberg was not only his deputy at Athlit, but his closest friend. "So Absa, the brave, was shot by vile, rapacious Bedouins," he lamented in his diary; "he fell dying into the hands of those whom he despised most."

There was little time for grieving, however, for Aaronsohn instantly appreciated the new problem Feinberg's apparent death raised: if the Turks found and identified his body, they would surely set to tearing Athlit apart and rounding up his a.s.sociates. Rushing back to Cairo, Aaronsohn went in frantic search of his newfound friends in the Arab Bureau, and found Windham Deedes.

The frustrations of nearly two years came out in a torrent. Amid tears, he blamed Feinberg's death on the incompetence and cynicism of the British war machine, and warned that his death was a mere harbinger of the many to come if the Turks uncovered his spy ring-as now seemed highly likely. "I spoke with fire and sorrow," Aaronsohn noted in his diary. "[Deedes] listened to me kindly.... He a.s.sured me that in future there would be no more humiliation and distrust and that everything would go well."

True to Deedes's word, a spy ship was immediately readied to make another run to Athlit. This time, Aaronsohn distinctly saw signals from the research station's balcony, and a launch was cast off to take his messages ash.o.r.e. In an eerie reprise of the earlier voyage, however, another storm descended at just that moment, compelling the launch to stay offsh.o.r.e and a lone courier to swim the last stretch to the beach. After a tense hour's wait, the swimmer reappeared on the sh.o.r.e with two men from Athlit, but by now the storm was raging; unable to swim out to the launch, this courier, too, was left behind.

More bad news soon followed. Guided by Lishansky's description of the attack, a Bedouin tracker was sent out into the Sinai in search of Absalom Feinberg. He found nothing. "So our brave Knight is dead!" Aaronsohn wrote in his diary. "Without even confessing it to myself, I had entertained a wild hope that he had survived. But now, we can do nothing except to complete the work for which he gave his life."

But this, too, was hardly a consoling thought to Aaron Aaronsohn. With Absalom Feinberg now dead and his brother Alex in America, the full burden and peril of operating the spy ring would fall squarely on the only person left in Palestine whom the scientist implicitly trusted: his twenty-seven-year-old sister Sarah.

IN SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM, Lawrence described the Arab army that left Um Lejj for the march on Wejh on January 18 in exalted terms. Coming just a little over a month since the debacle above Yenbo, Faisal now stood at the head of a force of some ten thousand warriors drawn from a half-dozen different tribes and many more clans. Lawrence underscored the importance of that moment by invoking the words of a young sheikh of the Beidawi tribe, Abd el Karim, as he gazed over the sea of tent encampments: "He called me out to look, and swept his arm round, saying half-sadly, 'We are no longer Arabs but a People.' He was half-proud too, for the advance on Wejh was their biggest effort, the first time in memory that the manhood of a tribe, with transport, arms and food for [covering] two hundred miles, had left its district and marched into another's territory without the hope of plunder or the stimulus of blood feud."

Perhaps, but born of such high purpose, it must have been rather anticlimactic when Faisal's forces cleared the dunes south of Wejh a week later to find the port town already a shattered, smoking ruin. It was an embarra.s.sing sight for Faisal ibn Hussein, and only slightly less so for that British member of his entourage who had become his greatest supporter.

By the timetable worked out with senior British officers at Um Lejj, Faisal's men were supposed to have reached Wejh fully two days earlier. At that point, a coordinated land-and-sea operation was to be launched, with Faisal's forces closing from the landward side while the British naval flotilla waiting offsh.o.r.e would ferry ash.o.r.e the some 550 Arab fighters they had transported up from Yenbo.

But as the British armada maneuvered into position leading up to H-Hour on January 23, Faisal's army had been nowhere to be seen. That night, the commander of the British fleet, Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss, decided that, for "sanitary reasons" alone, he simply had to put the Arab warriors on his ships ash.o.r.e. Following a brief bombardment on the morning of January 24, the shipborne Arab fighters had been ferried into Wejh under the command of two British officers.

The ensuing battle was a chaotic and fitful affair, one that lasted most of that day and left some twenty of the Arab fighters dead. No doubt contributing to its slow pace-the Turkish garrison of two hundred was outnumbered nearly three to one and demoralized-was the Arab habit of breaking off their attacks to loot and ransack whatever new buildings they occupied. One of the British officers in charge of the ground operation, Captain Norman Bray, was shocked by the rebels' behavior, noting in his battle report that the result of their freebooting ways was a town "ransacked from roof to floor." This was the scene that Faisal and Lawrence rode into the following day.