These sheiks of the air were first under a Captain Harold Furness-Williams; although during the later stages of the campaign an embryo parson, Captain Victor Siddons, became the flight-commander. On one occasion Furness-Williams flew from Egypt to Arabia, by way of the Sinai desert. Hung around the fuselage and back struts he carried a precious cargo consisting of four dozen bottles of Bass, which his fellow-sufferers in that thirsty land had commissioned him to bring. But under the eyes of his expectant friends the unfortunate aviator made a bad landing, the plane turned over, and every bottle was smashed. They told him that they would sooner have seen his blood soaking into the sands of the desert than that priceless liquid.
Captain Furness-Williams and his associates spent a portion of their spare time in taking the Arab chiefs for joy-rides. They gave old Auda Abu Tayi his first “flip,” and that cheerful chieftain, who had already demonstrated his courage by marrying twenty-eight wives, with the inborn poetic spirit of the desert declared upon his return to earth that he deeply regretted he had failed to take his rifle aloft with him. Never, he said, had he had such a splendid opportunity for taking pot-shots at all his “friends” in Akaba.
Among the Arabian knights of the air were Lieutenants Divers, Makins, Oldfield, Sefi, and several others, but the only one of them who went right through the campaign to Damascus was Lieutenant Junor, who dropped bombs during nearly every Arab battle and survived to play a similar rôle on the equally wild Afghan Frontier in India long after the World War.
In the southern area were a number of other officers of whom I saw little or nothing, men like Colonel A. C. Parker, a nephew of Kitchener, who was on the Red Sea coast for a short time and then appointed governor of the vast mountain and desert region called the Sinai Peninsula, where the children of Israel wandered for forty years. There also was Lieutenant-Colonel J. R. Bassett, transferred to Arabia from the War Office in London, who was second in command to Colonel Wilson at Jeddah, and Major H. J. Goldie, who described his headquarters in Jeddah as so hot that nothing could live there but human beings, and they could just gasp. Over around Medina, where Emir Abdullah’s army made things lively for the large Turkish garrison, were two more demolition experts, Majors W. A. Davenport and H. St. J. Garrood.