massacres at Marash, however, impressed upon the allied Governments the necessity of taking stronger measures, especially in view of the defiant attitude adopted by the Nationalist majority in the Turkish Chamber. The program of this party rejected all foreign interference, called for the return of all territory not occupied at the conclusion of the armistice, and demanded the acceptance of whatever decision the Arabs of Syria reached regarding their future. It also repeated the threat of the Nationalists under Mustapha Kemal that war would be begun in the Spring if the Greeks were left in Smyrna and the French in Cilicia.

The Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Safa Bey, in discussing the Cilician situation with a Constantinople correspondent of The Associated Press on March 6, asserted that the Turks at Marash had acted in self-defense, having been attacked first through a misunderstanding, and that "only 100 or 200 noncombatants" had been killed or wounded. He added:

The Government has done its best to keep order, but it is a hopeless task when foreign troops penetrate far into our country, as they have at Smyrna and

Marash, and antagonize the population and submit them to indignities. Free men will defend themselves under such conditions.

FAISAL PROCLAIMED KING Meanwhile, the Arabs, who were Cooperating more or less openly with the Turkish nationalists in Cilicia and Anatolia, were completing plans for a coup. A Pan-Syrian Congress at Damascus on March 8 formally declared Syria to be an independent State, and the event was celebrated with fireworks in Beirut that evening. Palestine, Lebanon and Northern Mesopotamia were included in the districts where the Arabs were undertaking to force allied recognition of a greater Syria under a Moslem ruler, with possibly a French adviser.

The next step followed on the 11th, when Prince Faisal, third son of King Hussein of the Hedjaz, was proclaimed King of Syria, according to Cairo advices to The London Times. At the same time an assembly of twenty-nine Mesopotamian notables sitting in Damascus was preparing to proclaim Mesopotamia a State under the regency of Prince Zeid, a brother of Faisal. Thus the situation in Asia Minor continued to acquire new complexities day by day.

HE

Franco-British

agreement of Sept. 15, 1919, somewhat dispersed the obscurity of the allied policy in the Levant, and in assuming command of our Syrian and Cilician troops General Gouraud, more fortunate than his predecessor, General Hamelin, will not be obliged to leave the French flag unfurled. But many clouds still remain to be dispelled beyond the mountains, artificial clouds which the Allies themselves, since 1916, when Hussein I. mounted the "throne " of the Hedjaz, have created. The demands made in 1915 by the Shereef of Mecca on the Bri ish negotiator, Sir Henry MacMahon, as the price for his military co-operation, have now become known; they embodied the creation of an Arab State bounded by the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, Persia and the 37th degree of latitude (including Cilicia). Only that! The Shereef was willing to yield Cilicia, but not Syria. The DamascusAleppo region, through which passes the Euphrates-Nile and Constantinople-Cairo railway, remains Zone A (Arab Zone), and the British troops will evacuate it without our being called to take their place.

What is the Hedjaz, which thus outweighs the powers whose victorious arms are the re-creators of life and civilization in the Orient? What domination do the followers of the Shereef aspire to establish? They proclaim Wilsonian principles. What traffic is covered by this flag? What soil, what race, what dynasty, what services, what policy?

Cast your eyes upon the historical maps where the boundaries of vanished empires mark the furthest advance of successive civilizations: From Cyrus and Alexander to the Romans and the feudal lords, the Arabian peninsula, south of Palestine, has been left intact; the great Arab sovereigns of the Middle Ages themselves left it neglected, the Ottoman Empire did not embrace it, and if it was attached to it in our days, it was only by the weakest of ties; and yet it contained Mecca!

*

*

The reasons for this abandonment are obvious to the traveler in Arabia: vol. canic mountains, deserts where every year four or five torrential rains revive a fugitive vegetation. * Is it famine which perpetuates the divisions among the inhabitants? In the Hedjaz, a region relatively populated, between the coast of the Red Sea and the desert. of the West, the territory is distributed between the many Bedouin tribes, half nomads, ready to fight for the highest bidder, but unwilling to go too far from their possessions lest they be seized by their neighbors during their absence. The warriors readily attack a rich convoy; they know how to make use of the ground, but aside from this they have no knowledge of military science and will not stand before any real danger. "I cannot fight any serious battle," acknowledged Emir Ali, "for the day that I should lose a hundred of my men all these tribes would turn their backs on me." After discharging their guns from shelter the Bedouins fall back

immediately; should we then be surprised that Medina remained in the hands of the Turks until January, 1919?

are

The Governors of the towns Shereefs or Lords tracing their descent from the two sons of the Prophet Ali. Formerly pensioners of the Turkish Government, their wealth, their material power determined their degree of influence; there are some who belong to the lowest classes.

Mecca, still a city forbidden to Christians, is inhabited by merchant importers, by robbers of pilgrims, by pilgrims representing all the races of Islam-Persians, Hindus, Malays, Javanese, Senegalese and Moors. Debauchery and the putridity of the worst maladies pervade the Holy City as much as they do Djeddah, its port on the coast.

HUSSEIN AND HIS SONS Hussein Ben Ali, of the tribe of Hachem, governed these two cities; he

was thus an important Shereef. But the war, by ruining pilgrimage and by blockading the Hedjaz, cut off his revenues and his supplies. He had been for thirty years the pupil and confidant of Abdul Hamid; he derived from this master, as well as from his old friend, the exKhédive Abbas, his political principles. His second son, Abdallah, became Vice President of the Ottoman Chamber, and continued to lean toward Constantinople; Abdallah, who was very ambitious, was jealous of the hereditary rights of his elder brother, Ali, and carefully fostered his own popularity among the Bedouins. The two younger brothers, Faisal and Zeid, pursued the profits of war, and each showed himself as jealous of the other's successes as he was unmoved by the other's defeats.

Faisal, the most enterprising of the four Emirs, wished above all to carry out his great project of becoming Prince of Syria. To accomplish this he needed

the English and in the connivance of certain Syrians which he purchased with cash or with fine promises; certain Christians formerly favorable to the French, certain Libanese who before the war had showed themselves fervent patriots, constituted his "court" and showed great activity, placing at his disposal all their education, their diplomacy and their own ambitions.

Such was the extent and the political nucleus of the Arab Empire dreamed of by Hussein.

In 1916 the revolt against the Turks by the High Shereef of Mecca aroused great hopes in the Allies; on the Asiatic front it meant a mortal blow dealt our enemies, it was "Pan-Islamism" confiscated in our favor, the Sovereign of the first of Holy Cities being bound to substitute his favorable influence for that of the Sultan of Constantinople. This "Pan-Arabism" would safeguard the African interests of France, a great Mussulman power.

The uprising of the Hedjaz certainly offered us immediate advantages; the immobilization of two Turkish divisions to the west of the Arabian Peninsula would facilitate the operations in Palestine and Mesopotamia; the breaking off of too-easy communications between Germanized Turkey and the African Continent would dam up the stream of emissaries who, through Abyssinia, Darfour, and Sahara, went forth to foment trouble in our possessions. The alliance with Hussein, then, was useful; but what help did it bring us in the Hedjaz itself?

THE SHEREEF'S ARMY

Richly paid with fine gold pieces sacrificed by the patriotism of allied citizens, and well provisioned, Hussein was able to add lustre to his crown, to pay off his immediate dependents, his functionaries, his soldiers and his partisans, who had never known such abundance before. His action was thus extended to some 40,000 or 50,000 Bedouins, bands naturally without organization, without power of resistance, without warlike valor. His small regular army, less than 4,000 soldiers composed of Turkish deserters, and natives of the Yemen, black

slaves, was commanded by former Turkish officers or by Arab officers who had learned their trade among the Turks, or by the dozen or so of European officers and the few hundreds of soldiers of the French and British Military Missions. A few Captains and Lieutenants, with their 65 and 80 millimeter guns and their machine guns, were the centre of every operation of any extent, and the Bedouin chiefs, before taking part in it, would ask if our men were in it. At the School of Military Instruction of Mecca an officer and ten French sharpshooters trained regulars " for the "armies" of the Emirs.

It is impossible to sum up here the guerrilla warfare initiated by these "armies " against the 4,000 to 5,000 Turks of the Expeditionary Force to the Hedjaz.. The narrow gorges and the mountain regions favored it, and, above all, the interminable line of Turkish communications. The small Turkish posts doing vigil over the thousand kilometers of the Maan-Medina railway were often surprised, the rails often damaged, with a frequency increased by the prospect of convoys to be pillaged; but trains still continued to run in 1918! On Nov. 11, 1917, Emir Ali tried to destroy the road at Bouat and obtained no result, his Bedouins having refused to fight against the Turks; on Nov. 17 Captain Pisani himself lighted the explosives placed on the rails near Akabet, but saw the Arabs disperse as soon the enemy's fire was discharged. On Jan. 24, 1918, the attack on Maan failed despite a very great numerical superiority and the aid of the English automatic machine guns, because the Arabs refused to attack the fortress. And one could cite many other examples analogous to these.

THE SHEREEF'S ADMINISTRATION

tained order-a wholly relative orderin the Arab-Syrian zone. How could it have been otherwise when Hussein had no firm ground on which to stand?

We had believed in the unifying virtue of his religious ascendency. Gross illusion! The religious unity of Islam was non-existent, and this Sunnite Emir could no more subject to his control the Shiites of Arabia than those of Syria, Persia, or India. Mussulmans of all sects wished from him only one service: To guard the holy places and to assure the freedom of pilgrimage; toward him personally they preserved an independence ever ready to revolt if he dared to threaten them. In December, 1918, as in 1915, he exercised authority only in Mecca, where he was virtually as much besieged as Fakri Pasha was at Medina. The hostile tribes of the Wahabites and the Shammars had defeated him to east and south in November and December; further to the south the Turkophil Arabs and the Turks of Moheddin held various towns. In the north, in Nedj, the Emir Ibn el Seoud, conqueror of the royal Emir Abdallah, and in Central Arabia the Emirs Ibn el Reshid and Ibn Sabah, whom even the Turks had never conquered, showed themselves indomitable. When in May, 1919, Hussein proclaimed himself Commander of the Faithful," that is, Khalif, the high religious leader of Islam, Ibn el Seoud swore that he himself and his two brothers "in God" would never cease their struggle against the usurper. "All the Sultans of Arabia are lords and shereefs," he observed, "whose noble origin is more authentic than that of the Emir of Mecca."

The royal throne which the Allies

have erected in Mecca is therefore maintained only by their support and otherwise has no foundation in reality. The Hedjaz is not the power which certain diplomatic organs would lead one to suppose, and the conception of which was inspired by political strategy. * * * But under the cover of war the drones have swarmed. Bedouins have occupied the western half of Syria, are installed in its principal towns, Damascus and Aleppo, on the railway which connects three continents, and which, for Western civilization, of which it is the creation, has inestimable value for the reclaiming of immense tracts of territory to economic life. Must we leave these Bedouins there?

"I am only a Bedouin," Emir Faisal is reported to have said on meeting M. Clemenceau, "a wandering Bedouin of the desert, who comes to speak to you with his heart." We have learned since of the feeling which he cherished toward us in his heart-a deep and unscrupulous hostility; and in regard to the Allies generally, an Arab "nationalism" which, in its essence, in its procedures, in its collusions, is the brother, the younger brother of the Young Turk Nationalism. Already the movement of Arab independence has been fused with that which the Turkish "Unionists" persist in conducting, and it can end only in renewals of the most violent fanaticism.

The interest of Syria itself requires us to save her from such a danger, and compels us, acting in harmony with our allies, to enforce the superior rights of humanity as against the unjustified and vain ambition of a son of the desert.