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Both Mecca and the near-by seaport of Jeddah were captured during the first month’s fighting. Jeddah was taken in five days as a result of the coöperation of five small British merchantmen under Captain Boyle, a daring red-headed Irishman, who was second in command to Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, then admiral of the Near Eastern Fleet.

More than a thousand Turkish and German prisoners were taken at Jeddah. The bombardment of this port of entry to the holy city of Mecca nearly started a revolution in India. The eighty million Mohammedans living in India are the most fanatical of all Islam in many respects. They erroneously charged the British with having bombarded one of their holy places. As a matter of fact, Jeddah, being merely the port to Mecca, has never been regarded as a holy city by the Arabs themselves and is the one city in the Hedjaz to which unbelievers have always been admitted.

At Medina the Bedouins, under Shereefs Feisal and Ali, were less successful. The tribesmen in northern Hedjaz, who had rallied round the Shereefian flag, swept out of the desert mists early on the same morning in June on which the attack was launched against Mecca. Occupying all the palm-groves which extend for miles around the outskirts, they drove the Turkish outposts from the gardens of the Medina palaces, fabled for their sparkling fountains, apricot, banana, and pomegranate orchards. The troops of the garrison withdrew inside the city walls. There they knew they had the additional protection afforded by the Tomb of Mohammed, the tomb which causes Medina to be regarded as the second holiest city of Islam. Although Feisal and Ali could have brought up cannon from Jeddah and perhaps taken the city by storm after a bombardment, Hussein refused to permit this for fear of causing the destruction of the Prophet’s tomb, a catastrophe which would have incurred the anger of every one of the two hundred and fifty million Mohammedans in the world.