Read Online Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia by Michael Korda - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Michael Korda
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with supplies, ammunition, and offshorebombardments of Turkish positions—but not to the point of wishing to see a British officer dressed like a native, or sauntering casually onto the bridge of HMS Suva with his hands in his pockets, as if the vessel were a cab he had just hailed on the Strand. Lawrence’s unmilitary appearance, his failure to salute, and his strongly expressed opinions on every subject under the sun, including the Royal Navy, sent Boyle’s temper soaring; but despite Lawrence’s diminutive height, improper attire, and irritating habit of omniscience, his combination of enthusiasm, sincerity, and practical common sense eventually put Boyle at ease, and by the time they reached Jidda they were friends, and would remain so for life. Boyle had discovered the most striking thing about Lawrence: however far-fetched his ideas might seem at first, he usually knew what he was talking about.
In Jidda they found HMS Euryalus, the flagship, with the commander in chief of the Egyptian Squadron, Vice-Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, GCB, CMG, MVO, on board, on his way to Port Sudan to meet with General Sir Reginald Wingate, governor-general of the Sudan and sirdar of the Egyptian army, at Khartoum. This was fortunate for Lawrence: Wemyss—a widely respected naval figure and a friend of King George V—combined impeccable connections with a fervent belief in the possibilities of the Arab Revolt. Indeed, a visit on board Wemyss’s flagship had been one factor clinching the Arabs’ decision to revolt: they were awed by the size of its guns, and indeed astonished that a vessel so big and heavy could float at all.
Wemyss was no stranger to odd behavior—he kept in his day cabin on board Euryalus a gray parrot trained to cry out, in a pronounced Oxford accent, “Damn the kaiser!"—and he liked Lawrence, whatever headgear Lawrence wore. Wemyss, who would come to Lawrence’s help again, always appearing at the right moment unexpectedly like a wizard in a pantomime, took him across the Red Sea to Port Sudan, and from there to Wingate’s headquarters in Khartoum, where Wingate—the original and firmest supporter of the Arab Revolt—read his reports and listened to his opinion that the situation in the Hejaz was not dire, as many peoplein Cairo supposed, but “full of promise.” What the Arabs needed, Lawrence said, was not British troops, whose appearance at Rabegh would cause the tribesmen to give up the fight and return to their herds, but merely a few Arabic-speaking British technical advisers, explosives, and a modest number of modern weapons.
As it happened, this was exactly the message that the chief of the imperial general staff (CIGS) in London most wanted to receive, for the terrible battles on the western front in 1916 made manpower a crucial question. Verdun had cost the French nearly 500,000 casualties, and the first Battle of the Somme, launched by the British to support the French at Verdun, would cost them more than 600,000 casualties, 60,000 on the first day alone; and General Murray, the commander in chief of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in Cairo, was under constant pressure from the CIGS in London to squeeze every possible division, brigade, and person out of his army for immediate dispatch to France.
Lawrence was perhaps the only person in the world who would have described his three or four days at Wingate’s palace in Khartoum—on the steps of which Lawrence’s predecessor in the imagination of the British public as a desert adventurer, General Gordon, had been murdered—as “cool and comfortable.” Everybody else who had visited Khartoum at any time of year described it as hellishly hot, though certainly Wingate’s palace was plush and lavish after the desert, and surrounded by beautiful gardens. When Lawrence was not conferring with Wingate and Wemyss, he spent his time reading Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, a pleasure interrupted by the kind of event that seldom failed to occur at
In Jidda they found HMS Euryalus, the flagship, with the commander in chief of the Egyptian Squadron, Vice-Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, GCB, CMG, MVO, on board, on his way to Port Sudan to meet with General Sir Reginald Wingate, governor-general of the Sudan and sirdar of the Egyptian army, at Khartoum. This was fortunate for Lawrence: Wemyss—a widely respected naval figure and a friend of King George V—combined impeccable connections with a fervent belief in the possibilities of the Arab Revolt. Indeed, a visit on board Wemyss’s flagship had been one factor clinching the Arabs’ decision to revolt: they were awed by the size of its guns, and indeed astonished that a vessel so big and heavy could float at all.
Wemyss was no stranger to odd behavior—he kept in his day cabin on board Euryalus a gray parrot trained to cry out, in a pronounced Oxford accent, “Damn the kaiser!"—and he liked Lawrence, whatever headgear Lawrence wore. Wemyss, who would come to Lawrence’s help again, always appearing at the right moment unexpectedly like a wizard in a pantomime, took him across the Red Sea to Port Sudan, and from there to Wingate’s headquarters in Khartoum, where Wingate—the original and firmest supporter of the Arab Revolt—read his reports and listened to his opinion that the situation in the Hejaz was not dire, as many peoplein Cairo supposed, but “full of promise.” What the Arabs needed, Lawrence said, was not British troops, whose appearance at Rabegh would cause the tribesmen to give up the fight and return to their herds, but merely a few Arabic-speaking British technical advisers, explosives, and a modest number of modern weapons.
As it happened, this was exactly the message that the chief of the imperial general staff (CIGS) in London most wanted to receive, for the terrible battles on the western front in 1916 made manpower a crucial question. Verdun had cost the French nearly 500,000 casualties, and the first Battle of the Somme, launched by the British to support the French at Verdun, would cost them more than 600,000 casualties, 60,000 on the first day alone; and General Murray, the commander in chief of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in Cairo, was under constant pressure from the CIGS in London to squeeze every possible division, brigade, and person out of his army for immediate dispatch to France.
Lawrence was perhaps the only person in the world who would have described his three or four days at Wingate’s palace in Khartoum—on the steps of which Lawrence’s predecessor in the imagination of the British public as a desert adventurer, General Gordon, had been murdered—as “cool and comfortable.” Everybody else who had visited Khartoum at any time of year described it as hellishly hot, though certainly Wingate’s palace was plush and lavish after the desert, and surrounded by beautiful gardens. When Lawrence was not conferring with Wingate and Wemyss, he spent his time reading Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, a pleasure interrupted by the kind of event that seldom failed to occur at