Modernization and the Growth of Nationalism 127
persons deported to remote parts of Anatolia. In the spring of 1916
the Turkish High Command despatched a picked force of brigade
strength with German staff-officers attached to reinforce their
troops in the Yemen, which had driven back the small British
garrison in the Aden Protectorate almost to the narrow confines of
Aden Colony itself. This Turkish force travelling south by the
Hijaz Railway arrived at Madina in May 1916. Its arrival greatly
alarmed the Sharif, who feared that his correspondence with the
British might have become known to the Turks, and that the force
had been sent to deal with him. In addition, the recent news from
Syria of the last and largest crop of political executions had finally
convinced the sceptical Faisal that nothing was to be gained by
further procrastination and haggling with both sides. The Arab
Revolt was accordingly begun on 5 June 1916. Lord Wavell has
commented, 'Its value to the British commander was great, since
it diverted considerable Turkish reinforcements and supplies to the
Hijaz, and protected the right flank of the British armies in their
aclvance through Palestine, Further, it put an end to German pro-
paganda iiiToSfE-western 'Arabia and removed any danger of the
establishment of a German submarine base on the Red Sea. These
were important services, and worth the subsidies in gold and
munitions expended on the Arab forces/1 That the Revolt did
not succeed in raising the civil populations of the Arab provinces is
partly due in Syria to the effectiveness of the Turkish repression,
and in Iraq to the unsympathetic attitude of the Indian Army
authorities, who withheld or minimized the news of the progress
of the Revolt in order not to encourage ideas of independence in
the local Arab population. The Government of India, aiming at
an outright British annexation of Lower Iraq, regarded the Cairo
Arab Bureau policy of encouraging Arab independence as vision-
ary, and its support of an Arab rising against the Ottoman Sultan-
Caliph2 as liable to cause unrest among the ninety million Muslims
of India, whose sentimental attachment to the Caliphate was mag-
nified by their immunity from the realities of Ottoman rule. The
Viceroy of India actually described the Arab Revolt as *a dis-
pleasing surprise whose collapse would be far less prejudicial to us
1 The Palestine Campaign, 56.
2 Later Ottoman sultans, and especially Abdul Hamid II with his pan-Is-
lamic policy, *had elaborated a fiction that the medieval Caliphate had passed
from the last Abbasid to them in 1517. cf. T. W. Arnold, The Caliphate, ch.
XIV,