suddenly feisal asked me if i would wear arab clothes like his own while in the camp. i should find it better for my own part, since it was a comfortable dress in which to live arab-fashion as we must do. besides, the tribesmen would then understand how to take me. the only wearers of khaki in their experience had been turkish officers, before whom they took up an instinctive defence. if i wore meccan clothes, they would behave to me as though i were really one of the leaders; and i might slip in and out of feisal’s tent without making a sensation which he had to explain away each time to strangers. i agreed at once, very gladly; for army uniform was abominable when camel-riding or when sitting about on the ground; and the arab things, which i had learned to manage before the war, were cleaner and more decent in the desert. hejris was pleased, too, and exercised his fancy in fitting me out in splendid white silk and gold-embroidered wedding garments which had been sent to feisal lately (was it a hint?) by his great-aunt in mecca. i took a stroll in the new looseness of them round the palm-gardens of mubarak and bruka, to accustom myself to their feel.
these villages were pleasant little places, built of mud brick on the high earth mounds encircling the palm-gardens. nakhl mubarak lay to the north, and bruka just south of it across a thorny valley. the houses were small, mud-washed inside, cool, and very clean, furnished with a mat or two, a coffee mortar, and food pots and trays. the narrow streets were shaded by an occasional well-grown tree. the earth embankments round the cultivated areas were sometimes fifty feet in height, and had been for the most part artificially formed from the surplus earth dug out between the trees, from household rubbish and from stones gathered out of the wadi.
the banks were to defend the crops from flood. wadi yenbo otherwise would soon have filled the gardens, since these, to be irrigable, must be below the valley floor. the narrow plots were divided by fences of palm-ribs or by mud walls, with narrow streams of sweet water in raised channels round them. each garden gate was over water, with a bridge of three or four parallel palm-logs built up to it for the passage of donkeys or camels. each plot had a mud sluice, scooped away when its turn for watering came. the palms, regularly planted in ordered lines and well cared for, were the main crop; but between them were grown barley, radishes, marrows, cucumbers, tobacco and henna. villages higher up wadi yenbo were cool enough to grow grapes.
feisal’s stand in nakhl mubarak could in the nature of things only be a pause, and i felt that i had better get back to yenbo, to think seriously about our amphibious defence of this port, the navy having promised its every help. we settled that i should consult zeid, and act with him as seemed best. feisal gave me a magnificent bay camel for the trip back. we marched through the agida hills by a new road, wadi messarih, because of a scare of turkish patrols on the more direct line. bedr ibn shefia was with me; and we did the distance gently in a single stage of six hours, getting to yenbo before dawn. being tired after three strenuous days of little sleep among constant alarms and excitements i went straight to garland’s empty house (he was living on board ship in the harbour) and fell asleep on a bench; but afterwards i was called out again by the news that sherif zeid was coming, and went down to the walls to see the beaten force ride in.
there were about eight hundred of them, quiet, but in no other way mortified by their shame. zeid himself seemed finely indifferent. as he entered the town he turned and cried to abd el kadir, the governor, riding behind him, why, your town is ruinous! i must telegraph to my father for forty masons to repair the public buildings.’ and this actually he did. i had telegraphed to captain boyle that yenbo was gravely threatened, and boyle at once replied that his fleet would be there in time, if not sooner. this readiness was an opportune consolation: worse news came along next day. the turks, by throwing a strong force forward from bir said against nakhl mubarak, had closed with feisal’s levies while they were yet unsteady. after a short fight, feisal had broken off, yielded his ground, and was retreating here. our war seemed entering its last act. i took my camera, and from the parapet of the medina gate got a fine photograph of the brothers coming in. feisal had nearly two thousand men with him, but none of the juheina tribesmen. it looked like treachery and a real defection of the tribes, things which both of us had ruled out of court as impossible.
i called at once at his house and he told me the history. the turks had come on with three battalions and a number of mule-mounted infantry and camelry. their command was in the hands of ghalib bey, who handled his troops with great keenness, acting as he did under the eye of the corps commander. fakhru pasha privately accompanied the expedition, whose guide and go-between with the arabs was dakhil-allah el kadhi, the hereditary law-giver of the juheina, a rival of sherif mohammed ali el beidawi, and after him the second man in the tribe.
they got across wadi yenbo to the groves of bruka in their first onset, and thus threatened the arab communications with yenbo. they were also able to shell nakhl mubarak freely with their seven guns. feisal was not a whit dismayed, but threw out the juheina on his left to work down the great valley. his centre and right he kept in nakhl mubarak, and he sent the egyptian artillery to take post in jebel agida, to deny that to the turks. then he opened fire on bruka with his own two fifteen-pounders.
rasim, a syrian officer, formerly a battery commander in the turkish army, was fighting these two guns; and he made a great demonstration with them. they had been sent down as a gift from egypt, anyhow, old rubbish thought serviceable for the wild arabs, just as the sixty thousand rifles supplied the sherif were condemned weapons, relics of the gallipoli campaign. so rasim had no sights, nor range-finder, no range tables, no high explosive.
his distance might have been six thousand yards; but the fuses of his shrapnel were boer war antiquities, full of green mould, and, if they burst, it was sometimes short in the air, and sometimes grazing. however, he had no means of getting his ammunition away if things went wrong, so he blazed off at speed, shouting with laughter at this fashion of making war; and the tribesmen seeing the commandant so merry took heart of grace themselves. ‘by god,’ said one, ‘those are the real guns: the importance of their noise!’ rasim swore that the turks were dying in heaps; and the arabs charged forward warmly, at his word.
things were going well; and feisal had the hope of a decisive success when suddenly his left wing in the valley wavered, halted; finally it turned its back on the enemy and retired tumultuously to the camping ground. feisal, in the centre, galloped to rasim and cried that the juheina had broken and he was to save the guns. rasim yoked up the teams and trotted away to wadi agida, wherein the egyptians were taking counsel avidly with one another. after him streamed the ageyl and the atban, the men of ibn shefia, the harb and biasha. feisal and his household composed the rear, and in deliberate procession they moved down towards yenbo, leaving the juheina with the turks on the battlefield.
as i was still hearing of this sad end, and cursing with him the traitor beidawi brothers, there was a stir about the door, and abd el kerim broke through the slaves, swung up to the dais, kissed feisal’s head-rope in salutation, and sat down beside us. feisal with a gasping stare at him said, ‘how?’ and abd el kerim explained their dismay at the sudden flight of feisal, and how he with his brother and their gallant men had fought the turks for the whole night, alone, without artillery, till the palm-groves became untenable and they too had been driven through wadi agida. his brother, with half the manhood of the tribe, was just entering the gate. the others had fallen back up wadi yenbo for water.
‘and why did you retire to the camp-ground behind us during the battle?’ asked feisal. ‘only to make ourselves a cup of coffee,’ said abd el kerim. we had fought from sunrise and it was dusk: we were very tired and thirsty.’ feisal and i lay back and laughed: then we went to see what could be done to save the town.
the first step was simple. we sent all the juheina back to wadi yenbo with orders to mass at kheif, and keep up a steady pressure on the turkish line of communications. they were also to push sniping parties down the agida hills. this diversion would hold up so many of the turks that they would be unable to bring against yenbo a force superior in number to the defenders, who in addition had the advantage of a good position. the town on the top of its flat reef of coral rose perhaps twenty feet above the sea, and was compassed by water on two sides. the other two sides looked over flat stretches of sand, soft in places, destitute of cover for miles, and with no fresh water upon them anywhere. in daylight, if defended by artillery and machine-gun fire, they should be impregnable.
the artillery was arriving every minute; for boyle, as usual far better than his word, had concentrated five ships on us in less than twenty-four hours. he put the monitor m.31, whose shallow draught fitted her for the job, in the end of the south-eastern creek of the harbour, whence she could rake the probable direction of a turkish advance with her six-inch guns. crocker, her captain, was very anxious to let off those itching guns. the larger ships were moored to fire over the town at longer range, or to rake the other flank from the northern harbour. the searchlights of dufferin and m.31 crossed on the plain beyond the town.
the arabs, delighted to count up the quantity of vessels in the harbour, were prepared to contribute their part to the night’s entertainment. they gave us good hope there would be no further panic: but to reassure them fully they needed some sort of rampart to defend, mediaeval fashion: it was no good digging trenches, partly because the ground was coral rock, and, besides, they had no experience of trenches and might not have manned them confidently. so we took the crumbling, salt-riddled wall of the place, doubled it with a second, packed earth between the two, and raised them till our sixteenth-century bastions were rifle-proof at least, and probably proof against the turkish mountain guns. outside the bastions we put barbed wire, festooned between cisterns on the rain catchments beyond the walls. we dug in machine-gun nests in the best angles, and manned them with feisal’s regular gunners. the egyptians, like everyone else given a place in the scheme, were gratifyingly happy. garland was engineer-in-chief and chief adviser.
after sun-down the town quivered with suppressed excitement. so long as the day lasted there had been shouts and joy-shots and wild bursts of frenzy among the workmen; but when dark came they went back to feed and a hush fell. nearly everyone sat up that night. there was one alarm about eleven o’clock. our outposts had met the enemy only three miles outside the town. garland, with a crier, went through the few streets, and called the garrison. they tumbled straight out and went to their places in dead silence without a shot or a loose shout. the seamen on the minaret sent warning to the ships, whose combined searchlights began slowly to traverse the plain in complex intersections, drawing pencils of wheeling light across the flats which the attacking force must cross. however, no sign was made and no cause given us to open fire.
afterwards, old dakhil allah told me he had guided the turks down to rush yenbo in the dark that they might stamp out feisal’s army once for all; but their hearts had failed them at the silence and the blaze of lighted ships from end to end of the harbour, with the eerie beams of the searchlights revealing the bleakness of the glacis they would have to cross. so they turned back: and that night, i believe, the turks lost their war. personally, i was on the suva, to be undisturbed, and sleeping splendidly at last; so i was grateful to dakhil allah for the prudence which he preached the turks, as though we might perhaps have won a glorious victory, i was ready to give much more for just that eight hours’ unbroken rest.
