Free Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia by Michael Korda Page A

reigned, stirred up in part by the impending departure of McMahon, and in part by concern for what was happening at Rabegh, owing to rumors that the Turks were about to attack. If the Turks were able to take Rabegh, they could outflank Feisal’s army and recapture Mecca, in which case the Arab Revolt would be over.

    Wingate.
    Happily, Lawrence, having just returned from the Hejaz and met Feisal, was in a position to calm these concerns. He was not alone in attributing them to Colonel Édouard Brémond, the head of the French military mission, who was as anxious to place a French military presence—in the form of North African Muslim soldiers and specialists—in Rabegh as most of the British were to keep them away. In the first place, the equivalent of a French brigade in Rabegh would mean that the British had to send one as well, and this the CIGS was unwilling to do. In the second place, the British were anxious to keep the French out of what was regarded as a British “sphere of interest.” Lawrence knew Brémond, a big and energetic man, a fluent Arabist with a wealth of experience in commanding Muslim troops in desert warfare; they behaved toward each other with exquisite courtesy but a complete lack of trust. Brémond reported to Paris on Lawrence’s anti-French sentiments, and Lawrence made no secret of his hope “to biff the French out of” the territory they coveted. The French colonial system, which operated so efficiently in Algeria and French Morocco, was exactly what Lawrence wanted to spare the Arabs: French settlers; a Europeanized native army with French officers; and the rule of French law, culture, and the French language imposed on those of the native elite who wanted something more for themselves and their families than looking after their herds, flocks, and fields in the desert. Lawrence had no great enthusiasm for the British colonial system, especially in India, but the French were undoubtedly more determined to impose French ideas and interests on the natives in their Arab colonies than the British were in theirs, and the result was that Lawrence often seemed more anxious to defeat France’s ambitions in the Near East than to defeat the Turks.
    Lawrence’s future was already being discussed at the highest level before he was even back in Cairo. The CIGS himself suggested to Wingate by cable on November 11 that Lawrence be dispatched to Rabegh “to train Arab bands,” while in Cairo Clayton had finally succeeded in getting Lawrence transferred full-time to the Arab Bureau, to handle propaganda aimed at the Arabs. Having secured Lawrence, Clayton wasunwilling to give him up, and there followed a brief, polite tug-of-war between Wingate and Clayton over him, complicated by the fact that if he was sent to Rabegh he would be under the command of Colonel Wilson in Jidda (who had referred to Lawrence as “a bumptious ass”).
    By this time the fear that Rabegh might fall had made its way up to the war cabinet in London, along with considerable pressure from the French government to place French “technical” units there to prevent this. Clayton ordered Lawrence to write a strong memorandum expressing his opinion that Allied troops sent to Rabegh would cause the Arab Revolt to collapse, which Clayton then cabled, unexpurgated, to the cabinet and to the CIGS. Thus, Lawrence’s views, which sensibly dismissed the possibility that Rabegh might be taken by the Turks so long as Feisal and his army were given the support he had requested, were accepted with relief in London, and quickly transformed into policy. Lawrence articulately presented his argument against sending the French units, as well as his belief that Yenbo, not Rabegh, was the important place, since it was nearer to Feisal’s army, and urged that every effort should be made to cut the railway line linking Damascus and Medina, rather than attempting to take Medina.
    Neither the Foreign Office nor the CIGS seems to have been taken aback