Lord Kitchener’s advice and his own personal observations led Lawrence to believe that a crash was imminent. When it came he at once attempted to enlist as a private in the ranks of “Kitchener’s Mob.” But members of the Army Medical Board looked at the frail, five-foot-three, tow-headed youth, winked at one another, and told him to run home to his mother and wait until the next war. Just four years after he had been turned down as physically unfit for the ranks, this young Oxford graduate, small of stature, shy and scholarly as ever, entered Damascus at the head of his victorious Arabian army. Imagine what the members of the medical board would have said if some one had suggested to them in 1914 that three or four years later this same young man would decline knighthood and the rank of general and would even avoid the coveted Victoria Cross and various other honors!

After his rejection Lawrence returned to his ancient ruins and toiled lovingly over inscriptions that unlocked the secrets of civilizations that flourished and crumbled to dust thousands of years ago. But, with many other scientists, scholars, and a few young men of exceptional ability, such as Mark Sykes, Aubrey Herbert, Cornwallis, Newcombe, and others, he was summoned to headquarters in Cairo by Sir Gilbert F. Clayton. Though he was then only twenty-six years old, he was already familiar with Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Persia. He had lived with the wild tribesmen of the interior, as well as with the inhabitants of the principal cities such as Aleppo, Mosul, Bagdad, Beyrouth, Jerusalem, and Damascus; in fact, his knowledge of some parts of the Near East was unique. He not only spoke many of the languages, but he knew the customs of all the different nationalities and their historical development. To begin with, he was placed in the map department, where generals spent hours poring over inaccurate charts, discussing plans for piercing vulnerable spots in the Turkish armor. After working out a scheme they would turn, not infrequently, and ask the insignificant-looking subaltern if, in view of his personal knowledge of the country, he had any suggestion to offer. Not infrequently his reply would be:

“While there are many excellent points in your plan, it is not feasible except at the expense of great loss of time in building roads for transport of supplies and artillery, and at needless expense of lives in maintaining lines of communication through the territory of hostile native tribes.”

Then, as an alternative, he would point out a safer and shorter route, with which he happened to be familiar because he had tramped every inch of it afoot while hunting for lost traces of the invading armies of Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, and Crusaders. The most staid old army officers on the staff put their confidence in this quiet-voiced junior lieutenant, and in a short time he had established a reputation for himself at G. H. Q.

Later on in Arabia, Lawrence frequently outwitted the Turks because of this same superior knowledge of the topography of the country. He was better acquainted with many distant parts of the Turkish Empire than were the Turks themselves.

From the map department he was transferred to another branch of the Intelligence Service, which dealt mainly with affairs inside the enemy lines. It was his duty, as one of the heads of the Secret Corps, to keep the commander-in-chief informed of the movements of various units of the Turkish army. Sir Archibald Murray, then head of the British Forces in the Near East, has told me how highly he valued the knowledge of this youth under whom were the native secret agents who passed back and forth through the Turkish lines.

It was in the summer of 1915 that the Hedjaz Arabs broke out in revolt against their Turkish masters in that part of the Arabian peninsula which lies mainly between the Forbidden City of Mecca and the southern end of the Dead Sea, known as Holy Arabia.

In order to understand the reasons for the outbreak of this revolution, and in order to appreciate the delicate and complicated problems which Lawrence was to face upon his arrival in Arabia after the Arabs had won a few initial victories and were confronted with the probability of their revolt collapsing, let us digress for a moment and glance in retrospect through the pages of Arabian history and refresh our memories regarding the romantic story of this historic peninsula and its picturesque peoples.

Legend tells us that Arabia was the home of our common ancestors, Adam and Eve, the land of the queen of Sheba, home of the heroes of “The Arabian Nights,” and a country peopled by a race that lived and hoped and loved before even the prehistoric mound-builders dwelt on the plains of North America, and before the druids in woad built their rock temples in Britain. Tradition tells us that it is a land whose peoples founded empires centuries before Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt, perhaps even before Khufu built the Great Pyramid. ArchÆologists, who have risked their lives to solve Arabia’s mysteries, tell us that great cities flourished and fell there long before the days of Tut-ankh-Amen and that in one distant corner of the country the great King Hammurabi formulated his code of justice long before Buddha taught on the banks of the Ganges and before Confucius enunciated the principle of the Golden Rule.

Jazirat-ul-Arab, the Peninsula of the Arabs, is larger than England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Holland, Belgium, France, and Spain all combined. The Greeks and Romans traded, fought, and studied there and divided it into three geographical parts: Arabia PetrÆa to the north, Arabia Deserta to the east, and Arabia Felix (Arabia the blest) to the west.

Although some scholars believe it to have been the birthplace of the human race, we have better maps of the north pole; in fact, we have better maps of Mars than we have of some parts of the interior of Arabia from whence came many of the fighting men of Lawrence’s army.

The distance from the city of Aleppo, at the extreme north, to the city of Mecca, half-way down the western coast of Arabia, is as great as the distance from London to Rome. Yet Lawrence and his men trekked all the way from Mecca to Aleppo on the backs of camels, over country as barren as the mountains of the moon.

In order to keep from becoming confused by the strange Arabic names it would be well for the reader to keep in mind that the Arabian campaign opened at Mecca and moved steadily north to Akaba, and then on to Damascus and Aleppo in Syria. Each event described in this account is a little farther north than the last.

Although some authorities on the Near East estimate that there is a total population of twenty million people in the whole of Arabia, for centuries a large portion of them have been held together only by loose travel alliances, like those which existed between the Red Indian tribes of America a hundred years ago.

The peoples of Arabia since time immemorial have been divided into two distinct classes: those who dwell in villages and cities, and those who wander from place to place with all their worldly possessions in their camel-bags. Both classes are called Arabs, but the wandering nomads are referred to as Bedouins whenever it is desired to differentiate between them and their kinsmen of the cultivated areas. The true Bedouin knows nothing about the cultivation of land, and his only animals are his camels and horses. The Bedouins are the more admirable of the two. They are the Arabs who have preserved the love of freedom and the ancient virtues of this virile race.

The foremost of all Arabian travelers was an Englishman, Charles M. Doughty, poet, philosopher, and author of that great classic, “Arabia Deserta,” written in quaint Elizabethan style. With the exception of Colonel Lawrence, he was the only European who ever spent any considerable length of time traveling about the interior of Holy Arabia without disguising himself as a Mohammedan. Doughty found, what all who know them have discovered, that the Bedouins are kind hosts if visited in their camps. But frequently the stranger who falls into their hands in the desert, under circumstances which according to their unwritten law do not cause them to regard him as a guest, finds them ruthless. In savage wantonness the Shammar Arabs may even cut his throat. There is a proverb in the desert that a man will slay the son of his mother for old shoe-leather; but, despite this, their hospitality is so sweeping that it has become proverbial throughout the world. “The Bedouin says: ‘Be we not all guests of Allah?’” Then adds Doughty, “After the guests eat ‘the bread and salt’ there is a peace established between them for a time (that is counted two nights and a day, in the most whilst their food is in him).”

The word “Arab” comes from “Araba,” the name of a small territory in an ancient province south of the Hedjaz, which is said to have been named after Yarab, the son of Kahtan, the son of Abeis, the son of Shalah, the son of Arfakhshad, the son of Shem, the son of Noah, who they say was the first to speak Arabic, “the tongue of the angels.” They are a Semitic people, of the same race as the Jews.

The world owes much to the Arabs. Not only did they invent many of our boyhood games, such as the humming top set spinning by pulling a cord, but they made great strides in medicine, and their materia medica was but little different from the modern. Their highly skilled surgeons were performing difficult major operations with the use of anesthetics in the day when Europe depended entirely upon the miraculous healing of the clergy. In chemistry we have them to thank for the discovery of alcohol, potassium, nitrate of silver, corrosive sublimate, sulphuric acid, and nitric acid. They even had experimented in scientific farming and understood irrigation, the use of fertilizers, and such things as the grafting of fruit and flowers. They were world-famous for their tanning of leather, their dyeing of cloth, their manufacture of glass and pottery, of textiles, and of paper, and for their unsurpassed workmanship in gold, silver, copper, bronze, iron, and steel.

The richest part of Arabia, excluding Mesopotamia, always has been, and still is, the province of Yemen in the extreme southwestern corner, a mountainous region just north of Aden, famous these thousands of years for its wealth, its delightful climate, the fertility of its valleys, and as the home of Mocha coffee. Strabo, the Greek geographer, tells us that Alexander the Great, shortly before his death, planned to return from India and there establish his imperial capital. Many scholars believe this rich region to have been the original habitation of man and the country whence the early Egyptians came. Beginning earlier than 1000 b. c., highly organized monarchies existed here such as the MinÆan, the SabÆan, and the Himyaritic. After the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, many Jews fled here, and their quaint descendants still reside in Yemen. But when the Ptolemies introduced the sea-route to India, the Yemen became less important, and for centuries the best-known part of Arabia has been the province of Hedjaz on the Red Sea, north of Yemen, bounded on the east by the Central Arabian region known as Nejd, and on the northeast and north by Syria, the Dead Sea, Palestine, and the Sinai Peninsula. The word “Hedjaz” or “Hijaz” means “barrier.” The fame of this particularly waterless country is due to its two chief cities: Mecca, the birthplace of Mohammed, in olden times called Macoraba; and Medina, the ancient Yathrib, where the Prophet spent the last ten years of his life and where he was interred. It is the duty of all Moslems who can afford it to make a pilgrimage to these sacred cities, just as it was the duty of the people to journey here in idolatrous pre-Islamic times.

About a thousand years before Columbus discovered America, a boy was born in the city of Mecca. This boy was destined to shape very materially the history of the world. As a youth he herded goats and sheep on the hills around Mecca, and then as a young man he hired himself out as a camel-driver to a rich widow in Mecca. He used to drive her camel caravans up to Syria to trade with rich merchants there. In Syria he became better acquainted with the religions of the Jews and the Christians and became convinced that his fellow-Arabs, who were worshipers of idols, did not possess a true religion. So this camel-driver appropriated some of the tenets of Christianity, some of the principles of Judaism, a few scraps of philosophy from the Persian fire-worshipers, a sprinkling of Arabian tradition, then threw in a number of his own ideas for good measure, and established a new religion. He encouraged his followers to regard Adam, Abraham, Moses, and Christ as prophets of Islam. To-day, however, they are looked upon as of infinitely less importance than Mohammed himself, whose teachings are regarded as a later and final revelation of the will of God. Nearly every family in Arabia has at least one child named after the Prophet. There are more men in the world bearing the given name “Mohammed” than there are with such names as “John” and “William.”

Is it so strange, after all, that the desert should be the old homestead of three of the world’s greatest religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism? The Arabs call the desert the Garden of Allah; they say there is no one in the desert but God. Out in the deserts of Arabia, even more than in many other parts of the world, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth His handy-work. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.” There is no striving in the desert to amass wealth for wealth’s sake; there is no mad rush to get ahead of one’s fellow-men. One of the curses of our modern civilization is that we do not have time to think or meditate. The desert is a fitting place for one to ponder over man’s destiny and to meditate upon the things that moth and rust do not corrupt and that thieves do not break through and steal.

Mohammed, the camel-boy of Mecca, was the first man to bind together in any sort of unity the peoples of Arabia. He came at the opportune time when a great leader was needed to drive out foreign domination. It was by his amazing evangelization that he succeeded in uniting the Arabs. To an even greater degree than most leaders of men this camel-boy of Mecca had:

Following the death of Mohammed came that great wave of fanatical fury when the Arabian peoples, filled with religious fervor, swept out of the desert, overran a great part of the world, and built up that huge Moslem Empire which was even greater than the empire of the Romans. In those triumphant days of Islam, the Arabs supplied the dominant religious, political, and military leaders for all the countries they conquered. They seemed irresistible. “When the Arabs, who had fed on locusts and wild honey, once tasted the delicacies of civilization in Syria, and reveled in the luxurious palaces of the Khosroes,” writes El Tabari, the Moslem historian, “they said, ‘By Allah, even if we cared not to fight for the cause of God, yet we could not but wish to contend and enjoy these, leaving distress and hunger henceforth to others.’” Within a century after the death of Mohammed the Hedjaz Arabs had built up an empire vaster than either that of Alexander or of Rome; “Islam swept across the world like a whirlwind.”

But the vast empire reached its zenith in the seventh century of this era, and its decline dates from the battle of Tours, a. d. 732, when the Arabs were defeated in France by the Christians under Charles Martel.

Many of the Arabs remained in the lands they had conquered. As merchants and missionaries they have carried the crisp, brief creed of Mohammed from Arabia to Gibraltar, Central Africa, Central China, and the islands of the South Seas. Unlike followers of other faiths, they shout their creed from the minarets and housetops of every land where they are to be found: “La-ilahu ilia Allah! Allahu Akbar!”

And even to-day we find thousands of Arabs occupying positions of affluence in far-off Hong-Kong, Singapore, the East Indies, and Spain. The others drifted back to their old life in the Arabian Desert. Once more Arabia stood isolated from the world by the barren mountain ranges which fringe its coasts and by its trackless belts of shifting sand. In the twelfth century the descendants of Saladin, who was half Kurd, conquered the fringes of Arabia. Then three centuries later a new tribe swept down from the unknown plateaus of Central Asia. They were of the tribe of Othman, forefathers of the modern Turks, and they attempted to govern the Arabs as though they were a people of an inferior race. The Turks claimed possession of Arabia for four hundred years, simply because they were able to maintain a few garrisons along the coast. A few of these garrisons were successful in holding out to the very end of the Great War, but at last they surrendered, leaving Arabia once again in the undisputed possession of its freedom-loving inhabitants.

The Hedjaz tribes have never acknowledged the sovereignty of any foreign ruler. They have preserved their liberty with but little interruption since prehistoric times, and consequently they regard their personal freedom above all else. Great armies have been sent against them, but not even the Assyrians, the Medes, the Persians, the Greeks, or the Romans were able to conquer them.

Ever since the decline of the Arabian Empire, more than a thousand years ago, generals, sultans, and califs have attempted to unify the peoples of Arabia, and particularly of the province of Hedjaz, because it contains the two sacred Mohammedan cities. None were successful, but where they failed, Thomas Edward Lawrence, the unknown unbeliever, succeeded. It remained for this youthful British archÆologist to go into forbidden Arabia and lead the Arabs through the spectacular and triumphant campaign which helped Allenby break the backbone of the Turkish Empire and destroy the Pan-German dream of world dominion. The way in which he swept the Turks from Holy Arabia and temporarily built this mosaic of peoples into a homogeneous nation, now known as the Kingdom of the Hedjaz, is a story that I should have failed to believe had I not visited Arabia and come into personal contact with Lawrence and his associates during their campaign.

Perhaps no factor played a greater part in simplifying Lawrence’s task in Arabia than the existence of an ancient desert fraternity which has been called “the cult of the Blood of Mohammed.” We must know something about this cult and its present-day leaders in order to understand the diplomacy and strategy of Colonel Lawrence which we are to follow during the desert war.