A BEDOUIN BATTLE IN A CITY OF GHOSTS
The possession of Petra is necessary to the holding of Akaba, the
most important strategical point on the west coast of Arabia, where
the great fleets of King Solomon rode at anchor three thousand
years ago. But Lawrence’s battle was the first fought in Petra in
the last seven hundred years. The Crusaders, with their flashing
spears and pennants blazoned with the coats of arms of half the
medieval barons of Europe, were the last warriors to clank in armor
through the ribbon-like gorge. Lawrence, the archæologist, garbed
in Arab kit, had wandered over this country before the war and knew
every foot of the region from the driest water-hole to the most
dilapidated column in Petra. After he had forced the Turks to
surrender at Akaba, he was determined to capture all the approaches
to the high plateau which begins fifty miles inland from the head
of the gulf of Akaba and crosses Arabia to the Persian Gulf. At
the same time the Turks realized that they must either recapture
Akaba or reconcile themselves to the loss of all Holy Arabia. So
they brought ten thousand fresh troops from Syria and stationed
them at the various strategical positions on this plateau. But
Lawrence was certain that the Turks would never be able to retake
Akaba, because there is only one feasible avenue of approach for
an army by land to that ancient seaport—down the Wadi Ithm. To be
sure, he had marched his own irregular army through the same gorge
a few weeks before, but he had caught the Turks napping and swept
down on Akaba before they were aware of their danger. He had no
intention of giving the Turks a similar opportunity. The Wadi Ithm
is one of the most formidable passes in the world for an armed
force to enter; it is as difficult of accesses as the famous Khyber
Pass between India and Afghanistan. It penetrates the barren
volcanic range called King Solomon’s Mountains, which extends along
the eastern shore of the Gulf of Akaba and rises a sheer five
thousand feet on either side of the pass. An invading army, if
attacked from the tops of the peaks crowning its sides, would have
no protection. Lawrence would have annihilated any Turkish force
attempting to advance on Akaba through the Wadi Ithm.
From July until the middle of September, 1917, the Turks were
quiet. Then they made several reconnaissances around Petra in an
effort to dupe Lawrence and the Arabs into believing they were
going to attack Petra, although their real intention was to advance
direct on Akaba. The last of these three reconnaissances was a
gloomy affair for the Turks; Lawrence and his men cut off and wiped
out one hundred of the scouting-party.
Fifteen miles northeast of Petra an old Crusader castle frowns down
on the desert from a steep hill of white chalk. It is known as
Shobek. Baldwin I, king of Jerusalem, built a great wall all the
way around the crest of the mountain in the days of the Crusaders.
Both the castle and the modern Arab village are within the wall,
and the only approach to the summit is up a winding precipitous
trail. Shobek was still in the hands of the Turks, but Lawrence’s
spies brought him word that the garrison was made up entirely of
Syrians, all men of Arabian blood, in sympathy with the new
Nationalist movement. So Lawrence sent Malud and ten of his
lieutenants to Shobek by night, followed by Shereef Abd el Mu’in
and two hundred Bedouins.
The Syrians in a body transferred their allegiance to him. Next
morning the combined Syrian and Arabian forces descended the chalk
mountain and destroyed three hundred rails on a side-line of the
Damascus-Medina Railway, near Aneiza. They also tried to capture
the terminus of this spur, where seven hundred Armenian wood-cutters,
whom they wanted to rescue, were at work. But this time the Turks
had erected such strong fortifications around the terminus that,
although the Arabs and Syrian deserters took the Turkish outposts,
they were unable to capture the main positions. The Turks, badly
frightened, sent couriers to Maan and Abu el Lissal asking for
reinforcements. By weakening their garrison at Abu el Lissal the
Turks played directly into Lawrence’s hands, for as soon as the
Turkish reserves arrived Lawrence called his men back to Petra from
the railway.
After the desertion of the entire Shobek garrison and Lawrence’s
bold sortie against the railway terminus, Djemal Pasha,
commander-in-chief of the Turkish armies in Syria, Palestine, and
Arabia, decided, against the advice of Field-Marshal von Falkenhayn,
then German generalissimo in the Near East, that before he could
hope to recapture Gueirra and Akaba it would be necessary to retake
Petra. Djemal transferred a crack cavalry regiment, an infantry
brigade, and several organizations of light artillery from Palestine
down the Hedjaz Railway to Maan. This was a clever strategic coup
for Lawrence. First, the Germans and Turks had to diminish their
forces opposing Allenby in the Holy Land. Secondly, they were
walking into the trap which had been set for them; because it was
Lawrence’s belief that if a battle were fought by his irregular
Bedouin troops in the mountain fastnesses of ancient Edom, the
superior mobility of his army would eventually enable him to defeat
any division of methodically trained regulars in the world.
Malud Bey, Lawrence’s first in command at the battle of Petra, was
one of the most interesting figures of the Arabian revolt, as well
as one of the most picturesque. He wore very high purple-topped
Kafir boots—like Jack the Giant-Killer must have worn; also spurs
that jangled musically as he strode about, a long medieval sword,
and a long mustachio, which he tugged like the villain of a
melodrama. But there was no more charming and gallant officer in
the whole Arabian army. He was the son of a Bedouin sheik and a
Circassian concubine and from boyhood had been an ardent Arab
Nationalist. He made a thorough study of modern military science
in order that some day he might help to overthrow the Turk, and he
even went so far as to spend three years studying at the Turkish
Staff College before they discovered his revolutionary leanings
and expelled him. Then he went into the desert and became secretary
to Ibn Rashid, one of the potentates of Central Arabia. There Malud
participated in scores of raids and earned such a reputation as a
fighter that the Turks forgave him his past sins and invited him
to return and join their cavalry. At the outbreak of the World War
he was raised to the rank of captain, but he was later
court-martialed and imprisoned for taking part in a conspiracy
against the sultan. After his release he fought the British in
Mesopotamia and was captured by them near Basra. Eventually he was
allowed to join Feisal. He was wounded in every single engagement
in which he took part, because he was so foolhardy that he would
not hesitate to charge the Turkish army by himself.
Djemal Pasha selected Maan, the most important station on the
Hedjaz Railway between the Dead Sea of Medina, as the starting-point
for three columns comprising over seven thousand men, several units
of light artillery, and a squadron of German aëroplanes. One column
made the Crusaders’ castle at Shobek its base; another came up from
the south by the way of Abu el Lissal and Busta; and the third
moved direct from Maan on the east. The Turks directed the movements
of their columns so that they would all converge on Petra on
October 21.
In the meantime Lawrence and his Bedouins were comfortably and
safely lodged in the ancient capital of the Nabatæans, behind those
mighty rocky ramparts which had defied the armies of Alexander the
Great. For the first time in many centuries the silent avenues
throbbed with life. Camp-fires were lighted on the old altars of
the gods; and sentinels stationed on the ancient great high places
watched for the coming of the Turks. In the vast echoing chambers
of the tombs the Arabs sat around in circles until late at night,
telling interminable stories and singing old chants of epic battles.
Lawrence himself occupied princely headquarters, the Temple of Isis
(El Khazneh), the rose-tinted palace at the entrance of the gorge.
If he wished he could have used his archæological imagination and
re-peopled the gloomy hall with the vision of handmaidens of Isis
dancing before the shrine of their goddess.
Photograph: THE AUTHOR, WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA
Photograph: SHEIK AUDA ABU TAYI, THE BEDOUIN ROBIN HOOD
Instead, he sent for Sheik Khallil of Elgi, a neighboring village,
and told him it would be necessary to summon all the able-bodied
women for miles around to help reinforce his troops. Arabian women
may not have gone in for Red Cross work and women’s motor-corps or
canteen service, as their Western sisters did during the war, but
they have always encouraged their men to fight. In the incessant
tribal warfare they are often in the rear, encouraging their men
with praise, chanting songs of Bedouin heroes, and shrieking words
of blame if their own men-folk are not gallantly charging into the
thick of the fray. A few centuries ago the fighting forces of the
desert always had two or three of their women dressed in resplendent
robes to act as standard-bearers. This, however, was the first time
in Arabian history that armed battalions of women actually engaged
in battle.
The Bedouin women living in the vicinity of Petra rose magnificently
to the emergency. They dropped their butter-making and their
weaving and thronged to Lawrence’s headquarters under the leadership
of Sheik Khallil’s wife. No smart uniforms with braid and buttons
for the Bedouin Amazons! Barefooted, with long blue cotton robes,
wearing gold bracelets and rings in their ears and noses, they
gathered from all quarters to form their Battalion of Death.
Rallying to the call of Lawrence, who had few men at his disposal,
they fought with as great valor as their husbands and brothers and
played a vital part in routing the Turks.
Lawrence, remembering the stout defense put up by the old Nabatæan
kings, when Alexander’s army failed to capture Petra, stationed
the Bedouin women at the narrow gorge opposite the Temple of Isis
to defend the city. The women were fierce in their enthusiasm and
needed no coaching to make them capable musketeers. They hid behind
the pillars of the temple, some of them with their half-grown
children, and covered with their rifles the gorge, which was so
narrow that only a few Turks and Germans could march through
abreast. The women held their ground and were not even panic-stricken
when German aëroplanes swooped down over the rock temples and
dropped bombs on the streets, theater and water-circus. They
clutched their rifles only the more tightly when one German bomb
made a direct hit on an Arabian machine-gun, causing the Maxim and
its crew to vanish as though spirited away. Throughout the whole
battle Lawrence commanded from the top of the north ridge. He had
with him a force of fifty Bedouin youths, who were selected for
their speed as runners and who proved most valuable as orderlies.
They could sprint like hares and clamber about the rocks with the
agility of the oryx. If one had viewed the battle from the Arabian
positions and seen only the women and the Bedouin men dressed in
every conceivable desert costume, mounted on horses and camels
without saddles, and using nearly every weapon invented by man from
the dawn of time, if one could have eliminated the modern note
provided by the trench-helmets and commonplace lead-colored uniforms
of the Turks and by their squadron of aëroplanes, one might easily
have mistaken the battle of Petra for a clash between the ancient
Edomites and the kings of Israel.
Lawrence had only two mountain-guns and two machine-guns, but with
these he held the first ridge five miles south of Petra for over
six hours and killed sixty Turks, with practically no casualties
on his side. Then, when the enemy attack had fully developed, when
the Turks and Germans were advancing straight up the ridge in spite
of the fire of the Arabs, Lawrence vacated it and sent half his
men to occupy a ridge a little nearer Petra to the south, and the
other half to a ridge on the opposite side of the valley on the
north. Between his two companies ran the wide part of the Wadi
Musa, a mile distant from the point where it narrows down and
becomes a mere cleft through the mountain wall south of the city.
The Turks, elated at having captured the trenches on the first
ridge, were certain that they had decisively beaten Lawrence’s
forces; so they charged enthusiastically over the summit and down
into the valley, thinking the Arabs had surely retired all the way
into Petra. Meanwhile, Lawrence and his men were hiding in ambush
on the hills of Petra. He permitted at least a thousand of the
enemy’s troops to push headlong into the gorge before he gave the
order to fire. When he had the Turks wedged into the narrowest part
of the gorge, near the entrance to the city, one of his aides fired
a rocket into the air as a signal for the Arabs to attack. A moment
later pandemonium broke loose in the mountains of Edom. The Arabs
poured in a stream of fire from all sides. The crack of rifles
seemed to come from every rock. With shrill screams the women and
children tumbled huge boulders over the edge on the heads of the
Turks and Germans hundreds of feet below. Those stationed behind
the columns of the Temple of Isis kept up a steady fire. Utterly
bewildered, the invaders became panicky and scattered in all
possible directions, while the Arabs on the ridges continued to
devastate their broken ranks.
A few minutes before the sun declined behind the rose-colored
mountains, Lawrence and Malud Bey sent up a second signal to their
followers.
“Up, children of the desert!” shouted Malud.
Crouching figures sprang from behind the rocks on all sides.
“Allah! Allah!” came the answer from the throats of hundreds of
Bedouins as they swept down the ridges into the valley.
The Arabs captured the entire Turkish transport, a complete
field-hospital, and hundreds of prisoners. One body of over a
thousand Turks, who succeeded in retreating to Busta in fair order,
fought their way back several days later to Abu el Lissan and to
Maan.
After the battle, Lawrence slipped through the Turkish lines in
disguise and returned with a copy of the Turkish communiqué
describing the battle. It brought roars of laughter from the
victorious Arabs. It ran:
We have stormed the fortifications of Petra, losing twelve
killed and ninety-four wounded. The Arab losses are one
thousand dead and wounded, and we counted seventeen
British officers among the bodies.
The only British officers, except Lawrence, who were in that part
of Arabia at the time were many miles away, at Akaba. Lawrence
himself had worn his Arab robes. His losses were twenty-eight
killed and wounded. The Turks had made a little error of 972 in
their estimate.