our check in mesopotamia was a disappointment to us; but mcmahon continued his negotiations with mecca, and finally brought them to success despite the evacuation of gallipoli, the surrender of kut, and the generally unfortunate aspect of the war at the moment. few people, even of those who knew all the negotiations, had really believed that the sherif would fight; consequently his eventual rebellion and opening of his coast to our ships and help took us and them by surprise.
we found our difficulties then only beginning. the credit of the new factor was to mcmahon and clayton: professional jealousies immediately raised their heads. sir archibald murray, the general in egypt, wanted, naturally enough, no competitors and no competing campaigns in his sphere. he disliked the civil power, which had so long kept the peace between himself and general maxwell. he could not be entrusted with the arabian affair; for neither he nor his staff had the ethnological competence needed to deal with so curious a problem. on the other hand, he could make the spectacle of the high commission running a private war sufficiently ridiculous. his was a very nervous mind, fanciful and essentially competitive.
he found help in his chief of staff, general lynden bell, a red soldier, with an instinctive shuddering away from politicians, and a conscientiously assumed heartiness.
two of the general staff officers followed their leaders full cry; and so the unfortunate mcmahon found himself deprived of army help and reduced to waging his war in arabia with the assistance of his foreign office attache’s.
some appeared to resent a war which allowed outsiders to thrust into their business. also their training in suppression, by which alone the daily trivialities of diplomacy were made to look like man’s work, had so sunk into them that when the more important thing arrived, they made it trivial. their feebleness of tone, and niggling dishonesties to one another, angered the military to disgust; and were bad for us, too, since they patently let down the high commissioner, whose boots the g— s were not good enough to clean.
wingate, who had complete confidence in his own grasp of the situation in the middle east, foresaw credit and great profit for the country in the arab development; but as criticism slowly beat up against mcmahon he dissociated himself from him, and london began to hint that better use might be made by an experienced hand of so subtle and involved a skein.
however it was, things in the hejaz went from bad to worse. no proper liaison was provided for the arab forces in the field, no military information was given the sherifs, no tactical advice or strategy was suggested, no attempt made to find out the local conditions and adapt existing allied resources in material to suit their needs. the french military mission (which clayton’s prudence had suggested be sent to hejaz to soothe our very suspicious allies by taking them behind the scenes and giving them a purpose there), was permitted to carry on an elaborate intrigue against sherif hussein in his towns of jidda and mecca, and to propose to him and to the british authorities measures that must have ruined his cause in the eyes of all moslems. wingate, now in military control of our cooperation with the sherif, was induced to land some foreign troops at rabegh, half-way between medina and mecca, for the defence of mecca and to hold up the further advance of the reinvigorated turks from medina. mcmahon, in the multitude of counsellors, became confused, and gave a handle to murray to cry out against his inconsistencies. the arab revolt became discredited; and staff officers in egypt gleefully prophesied to us its near failure and the stretching of sherif hussein’s neck on a turkish scaffold.
my private position was not easy. as staff captain under clayton in sir archibald murray’s intelligence section, i was charged with the ‘distribution’ of the turkish army and the preparation of maps. by natural inclination i had added to them the invention of the arab bulletin, a secret weekly record of middle-eastern politics; and of necessity clayton came more and more to need me in the military wing of the arab bureau, the tiny intelligence and war staff for foreign affairs, which he was now organizing for mcmahon. eventually clayton was driven out of the general staff; and colonel holdich, murray’s intelligence officer at ismailia, took his place in command of us. his first intention was to retain my services; and, since he clearly did not need me, i interpreted this, not without some friendly evidence, as a method of keeping me away from the arab affair. i decided that i must escape at once, if ever. a straight request was refused; so i took to stratagems. i became, on the telephone (g.h.q. were at ismailia, and i in cairo) quite intolerable to the staff on the canal. i took every opportunity to rub into them their comparative ignorance and inefficiency in the department of intelligence (not difficult!) and irritated them yet further by literary airs, correcting shavian split infinitives and tautologies in their reports.
in a few days they were bubbling over on my account, and at last determined to endure me no longer. i took this strategic opportunity to ask for ten days’ leave, saying that storrs was going down to jidda on business with the grand sherif, and that i would like a holiday and joyride in the red sea with him. they did not love storrs, and were glad to get rid of me for the moment. so they agreed at once, and began to prepare against my return some official shelf for me. needless to say, i had no intention of giving them such a chance; for, while very ready to hire my body out on petty service, i hesitated to throw my mind frivolously away. so i went to clayton and confessed my affairs; and he arranged for the residency to make telegraphic application to the foreign office for my transfer to the arab bureau. the foreign office would treat directly with the war office; and the egypt command would not hear of it, till all was ended.
storrs and i then marched off together, happily. in the east they swore that by three sides was the decent way across a square; and my trick to escape was in this sense oriental. but i justified myself by my confidence in the final success of the arab revolt if properly advised. i had been a mover in its beginning; my hopes lay in it. the fatalistic subordination of a professional soldier (intrigue being unknown in the british army) would have made a proper officer sit down and watch his plan of campaign wrecked by men who thought nothing of it, and to whose spirit it made no appeal. non nobis, domine.
