Hero

From the brilliant book by Michael Korda:
 The government of India vigorously contested both the idea of the Arab Revolt and any promise to the Arabs of a future state. The govern-ment of India saw no signs in Basra that the Arabs wanted or would know what to do with self-government, and they proposed to run Mesopota-mia as an extension of colonial rule in India. In the same spirit, they were backing ibn Saud with arms, support, and money, which, since he was the mortal rival of Sharif Hussein, put Delhi and London at loggerheads. Sykes does not seem to have been deeply troubled by any of this—he was a man who could hold several passionate enthusiasms in his head at the same time without apparently noticing that they were contradictory. He was at once sincerely in favor of an Arab state and a wholly commit-ted supporter of Zionism;* he was determined to give the French what they wanted, and at the same time in favor of McMahon's correspondence with Sharif Hussein. He was sympathetic toward both Turks and Arabs, as well as Armenians and Kurds. If Sykes was aware that the one point most Arabs agreed on, whatever their other differences, was that the heart of any viable Arab state must be Syria, and that under no circumstances would they accept French domination, given France's colo-nial record in North Africa, he managed to suppress this when he finally returned to London to report on his mission. It is typical of Sykes that he not only helped form the sentiment behind, and draft the language of the Balfour Declaration, but also designed the flag of the Arab Revolt, "a combination of green, red, black and white." (Variations of this design would become the national flags of Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Palestine.) Sykes is an example of a fatal British ability to see both sides of a dispute in an area of the world where there are only absolutes.
" This was a fairly common delusion among the British at the time, right up to the Balfour Declaration in 1917. It was based on the assumption that—the Arabs and Jews both being Semitic peoples—the Jews would contribute to an Arab state their knowl-edge' of international finance, science, and medicine, as well as the growing agricultural expertise of the Zionists. This was, and has since proved to be, overoptimistic.
 To say that the Christmas spirit was lacking in these discussions would be putting it mildly. Although it would be only two months before the Germans launched the Battle of Verdun in an attempt to bleed the French army to death (the battle would last nine months and cost the French nearly 400,000 casualties), the French were already impatient with their British ally, which, they thought, was not pulling its weight in the war; and they were as well deeply distrustful of British policy. Picot was a master of detail and a determined negotiator, and virtually the product of French colonial ambitions. His father was a founding member of the Comite de l'Afrique Francaise, and his brother the treasurer of the Com le de 1'Asie Francaise, both well-financed right-wing organizations with solid bourgeois support for the promotion of French colonialism. Picot himself had a deep, instinctive belief not only in France's mission civilisatrice, but in its imperative need to emerge from the war with a substantial gain in overseas territory as some compensation for the enor-mous sacrifices it was making. Quite apart from that, Picot, like many of the French, had an almost mystical belief in France's deep historical con-nections to Lebanon and Syria, going back nearly 1,000 years to the Cru-sades and continuing through Napoleon Bonaparte's conquest of Egypt. Syria and Lebanon were referred to as La France du Moyen-Orient, and in Paris it was widely assumed that the indigenous inhabitants of "France of the Middle East" were eagerly awaiting the imposition of French cul-ture, laws, prosperity, and commerce. For a number of reasons rooted in the history of the Crusades, it was also assumed that "Syria" included not only Lebanon—You only had to look at the map, voyons, to see that Leba-non was nothing more than the Mediterranean coastline of Syria!—but Palestine. Had not Godefroy de Bouillon, after all, conquered Jerusalem and founded the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, creating a state where 100,000 French-speaking soldiers ruled over 400,000 Muslims and Jews?
The British had a touching faith in the value of royalty- hence their support of the princely states in India until 1947, and their eagerness to place Emir Feisal on the throne of Iraq and his brother Abdulla on the throne of Jordan- both of these monarchies were invented overnight on the British model. Ibn Saud had at least turned himself into a king without British help.

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 He was moved in part by the plight of the residents of Tafileh, whom the Turks would certainly punish severely for surrendering the town, and in part by a desire to prove to Allenby that the Arabs could fight and win a conventional battle. Until now, Lawrence had been following his own maxim: "To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife," and his aim was to keep the Turks trying to eat soup with a knife for as long as possible. His model was Marshal de Saxe, who had written, "I am not in favor of giving battle, especially at the outset of a war—I am even con-vinced that an able general can wage war his whole life without being compelled to do so." Now, Lawrence, a convinced admirer of de Saxe, was following instead the formula of Napoleon: "There is nothing I desire so much as a great battle." He had not changed his opinion about de Saxe, whose maxims would remain the essential basis for all guerrilla wars on into the present, but he recognized the political reality, which was that the British, and especially the French, were unlikely to take the Arabs' claims to territory seriously until the Arabs had demonstrated an ability to hold their ground and beat the Turks in a conventional battle of posi-tions. It was not that Lawrence's philosophy of war had changed; it was that politics, and its by-product, public relations—Lawrence had already learned something from Lowell Thomas—required something more than blowing up bridges and looting trains if the Arabs were to get Damascus. Since Lawrence considered it his job to get them Damascus, he made up his mind to fight the Turks at Tafileh. In desert skirmishes Lawrence's command was direct and unchal-lenged; by contrast, the force at Tafileh had, if anything, too many leaders for its size. The overall commander of the march toward the Dead Sea was Feisal's younger half brother Zeid, "a cool and gallant fighter," who did not have much experience directing a battle but who, as a son of the sharif of Mecca (now king of the Hejaz), had the respect of all the tribes, and even of Auda. The uniformed regulars were under the command of Major-General Jaafar Pasha, a former officer in the Turkish army and now Feisal's chief of staff, a competent professional soldier. Lawrence's bodyguard was led by Abdulla el Nahabi, a fearless adventurer with a series of murders and assaults on his head, as well as a price. As for the Bedouin, the bulk of them were divided into two mutually hostile fac-tions, since Auda's tribe and the Motalga were traditional blood enemies. By means of a lavish payment in gold, Auda was sent "back to his desert beyond the railway to contain the garrisons of the Turkish stations," thus removing one source of friction, but clearly the battle could not be won unless Lawrence took command of it, though he passed his orders through the Arabs' chief. It is always difficult to compare battles, but to anybody interested in military history, once allowance is made for the difference in climate and scale, the topography of Tafileh bears a startling resemblance to that of Gettysburg. Lawrence, then, was in the position of Lee, and Hamid Fakhri Bey in the position of Meade, when Longstreet launched his attack against Cemetery Ridge on the afternoon of July 3, 1863—with the crucial difference that Lawrence succeeded.

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The Bedouin disliked townsmen to begin with, and the popula-tion of Tafileh was mixed and therefore doubly offensive to them. The Ottoman government had force-marched to Tafileh nearly 1,000 Arme-nians who had escaped the massacre, as well as "a colony of freebooting Senussi from North Africa," part of the long-standing Turkish policy of settling areas with mutually hostile groups in order to give the local pop-ulation a presence they would hate more than they did the Turks. Zeid and Jaafar thought the townspeople were probably pro-Turk, and would welcome the Turks back, but Lawrence disagreed, and to prove his point made his way into Tafileh by night. He found that the local people, whether Arab, Armenian, or Senussi, were united only by their hatred of the Turks, and terrified by the fact that the Arab forces had marched out of town and abandoned them to their fate. The town was in chaos and terror, as people, in Lawrence's vivid description, "rushed to save their goods and their lives. . . . It was freezing hard, and the ground crusted with noisy ice. In the blustering dark the crying and the confusion through the narrow streets were terrible." The Motalga further terrified the townspeople by firing their rifles into the sky to keep their spirits up as they clattered out of the town at a gallop, while the approaching Turks fired back in the darkness to demonstrate how close they were. Under the circumstances, it seemed to Lawrence that the townspeople might be persuaded to fight in their own defense. As dawn broke he gath-ered up a score or so of the Motalga tribesmen and sent them forward with a few of the local peasantry to engage the Turks, who were deploying on the long ridge at the top of the triangular plain to the east of Tafileh. He then went off to find Zeid and persuade him that Jaafar was positioned on the wrong side of the town, and that the right place to fight a "pitched battle" was in front of the town, on the triangular plain, not on the hills behind. Fortunately, Zeid had already come to the same conclusion. Lawrence, when he wrote about the Battle of Tafileh, would dismiss the action as a military parody—"I would rake up all the old maxims and rules of the orthodox army text-book, and parody them in cold blood today"—
but there is no evidence of this in the report he wrote after the battle. On the contrary, no less a judge than Colonel A. P. Wavell, the future field marshal, would describe it as "one of the best descriptions of a battle ever penned." What strikes one most about Tafileh is that Lawrence could hardly have fought with more professional skill and personal daring.