THROUGH THE TURKISH LINES IN DISGUISE
Nearly all Arabs carry some sort of good luck charm, and the belief
in jinn or genii is still common. The talisman which Auda wore
round his neck was probably one of the most extraordinary to be
found in all Arabia. The amulet was a diminutive copy of the Koran
about one inch square, for which he paid more than two hundred
pounds. One day he displayed it with great pride, and Lawrence
discovered it had been printed in Glasgow and, according to the
price marked inside the cover, had been issued at eighteenpence.
So far as we could make out, the only things the Bedouins are
afraid of are snakes, and they believe that the sole protection
against them is such a charm worn round the neck.
There are thousands of reptiles in certain parts of the desert.
The worst snake belt in the Near East extends from Jauf to Azrak
along a chain of shallow wells in the North Arabian Desert, where
one finds, usually near the water, Indian cobras, puff-adders,
black whip-snakes, and hosts of others—nearly all deadly. Lawrence
once started out on an expedition with eighteen men five of whom
died on the way from snake-bite. Instead of relying on the usual
alcoholic antidote, he, like his nomad companions, put his faith
in Allah. In Arabia a snake will often snuggle up to a sleeping
Bedouin at night for warmth, but it will not bite—unless the
sleeper is unlucky enough to roll over and frighten it. Although
their consciences are by no means clear, nearly all Bedouins,
fortunately, are sound sleepers!
Photograph: A BEDOUIN ENCAMPMENT
Photograph: COLONEL LAWRENCE CONFERRING WITH COMMANDER D. G.
HOGARTH, ONE OF HIS ADVISERS AT THE ARAB BUREAU IN CAIRO
Whenever Lawrence and his men reconnoitered in the snake belt at
night they put on boots and were careful to beat every foot of
ground and every bush in front of them. When an Arab is bitten,
his friends read certain chapters of the Koran over him. If they
happen to choose correct passages, he lives; but if they have no
Koran, the unfortunate one in all likelihood dies. ’T is the will
of Allah!
Although the Arabs knew Lawrence was a Christian, once he had
gained their confidence, they often invited him to pray with them.
This he did only when he felt inclined to humor them, but he had
completely memorized all the important Mohammedan prayers so as to
be prepared for any unforeseen emergency when his declining to pray
might cause embarrassment to Emir Feisal and King Hussein in the
presence of members of strange tribes. Fortunately, no such
emergency ever arose.
But when he did pray with his Bedouins on several occasions, just
to please them, the procedure was as follows: Lawrence and his
body-guard would kneel on their prayer-rugs with their faces toward
Mecca. Then with one of the sheiks acting as leader they would go
through a ceremony consisting of rhythmic prostrations and the
repetition, in unison, of passages from the Koran. A certain number
of bows are made in the morning, so many at noon, and still a
different number at sunset, although the words repeated each time
are much the same. At the end of all prayers Lawrence and his men
would turn their heads to the right and then to the left before
rising. Lawrence explained to me that two angels were supposed to
be standing beside each person while praying. One angel records
good deeds and the other bad deeds, and it is customary to salute
them both. All good Moslems have five prayer services daily, but
Lawrence and his men usually cut them down to three by telescoping
two in the morning and two in the afternoon; otherwise the Arab
army would have spent more time praying than fighting.
Lawrence overcame the two greatest prejudices of the Bedouins;
namely, that he was a foreigner and a Christian. Most of the
foreigners these nomads had met were Turks whom they despised as
barbarians, for the Arabs are intellectual snobs. The only
Christians they know are the native Christians of the Syrian coast
and the Armenians, who are more accustomed to show the other cheek
than to show courage; the Arabs loathe them. It suited them for
the most part to ignore the fact that Lawrence was a Christian,
because they consider it a disgrace that any Christian should outdo
them at the very things at which they ordinarily excel. Occasionally,
however, they actually invited him to recite his Christian prayers
aloud, which he did most eloquently. Charles M. Doughty, the
traveler and poet, so far as I know, was the only man other than
Lawrence who ever wandered openly up and down Holy Arabia as a
Christian. All other explorers in the forbidden country of the
Prophet have disguised themselves as Moslems. Doughty had at least
a score of narrow escapes from death, and that he escaped at all
was due to the fact that he always went unarmed and did nothing
covertly. He took no money with him and made his way about by
healing the sick with simple remedies and by vaccinating Arabs. An
old man and a great scholar, he now lives at a watering-place on
the south coast of England. He and Lawrence are close friends, and
the younger man gives his predecessor full credit for “breaking
the ice” and making it possible for him and his associates to work
with the Bedouins during the war. In fact Doughty’s “Arabia Deserta”
was both Lawrence’s Bible and military text-book during the
campaign.
The magnificent Bedouin clothes that Lawrence wore were not
theatrical garb. They were a part of his carefully worked-out plan
to gain complete mastery over the Arabs. Although he did not
attempt to disguise either his religion or nationality, outwardly
he was an Arab. Except in certain areas, he found that being known
as a British officer and a Christian was less of a hindrance than
full disguise. Had he desired to pass himself off as a Bedouin, he
would have had to grow a beard, a feat he could not have achieved
even if the fate of the British Empire had depended on it. However,
on a few occasions he did disguise himself as a Bedouin woman and
made his way through the Turkish lines. But to other British
officers who desired to visit a tribe he recommended simply the
Arab head-cloth, to be worn out of courtesy and not as a disguise.
Bedouins have a malignant prejudice against the hat and believe
our persistence in wearing it is founded on some irreligious
principle. If you were to wear this season’s smartest Piccadilly
derby or Austrian velours in Mecca, your friends and relatives
would disown you.
“Adopt the kuffieh, agal, and aba, and you will acquire the
confidence and intimacy of the sons of Ishmael to a degree
impossible in European garb,” was a Lawrence maxim. “But to don
Arab kit has its dangers as well as its advantages. Breaches of
etiquette, excused in a foreigner, are not condoned if he is in
Arab clothes. You are like an English actor appearing for the first
time in a German theater. Even that is not a parallel, because you
are playing a part day and night, and for an anxious stake. Complete
success comes when the Arab forgets your strangeness and speaks
naturally before you.” So far as I know, Colonel Lawrence is the
only European who was ever accepted by the Arabs as one of
themselves.
His advice was that if you wear Arab dress, you should always wear
the best, for the reason that clothes are significant among the
tribes. “Dress like a shereef, if the people agree to it, and, if
you use Arab costume at all, go the whole length. Leave your
English friends and customs on the coast, and rely entirely on Arab
habits. If you can surpass the Arabs, you have taken an immense
stride toward complete success, but the effort of living and
thinking a foreign language, the rude fare, strange clothes, and
stranger ways, with the complete loss of privacy and quiet and the
impossibility of ever relaxing your watchful imitation of others
for months on end, prove such an added strain that this course
should not be taken without serious thought.”
Whenever Colonel Lawrence was not engaged in conducting major
military operations or planting tulips along the Hedjaz Railway,
he would disguise himself as an outcast Arab woman and slip through
the enemy lines. This was the best disguise for a spy, for the
Turkish sentinels usually considered it beneath their dignity to
say, “Stop, who goes there?” to a woman. Time and again he
penetrated hundreds of miles into enemy territory, where he obtained
much of the data which finally enabled Field-Marshal Allenby’s
Palestine army and Emir Feisal’s Arabian forces to overwhelm the
Turks in the most dazzling and brilliant cavalry operation in
history.
Lawrence once had a spare fortnight in which to make things lively
for the Turks while he was waiting for Auda Abu Tayi to assemble
his Howeitat warriors. Accompanied by a lone Bedouin of the Anazah
tribe named Dahmi, he passed through the Turkish lines in his
customary female disguise and made his way toward Palmyra, where
he hoped to find an influential Bedouin sheik who was in sympathy
with the Arabian revolt. This chief was a thousand miles away on
the Euphrates, and so Lawrence and Dahmi turned their camels toward
Baalbek. In the desert near that ancient Syrian city, famous for
its ruined temples, which rival the Acropolis at Athens, lives a
tribe of semi-nomads, the Metawileh, who were friendly to King
Hussein and Emir Feisal although they were compelled to coöperate
with the Turks. Lawrence wanted to visit these Metawileh to assure
himself of their assistance some months later when the final
advance would be launched and when he expected the Hedjaz forces
and Allenby’s troops to push the Turks north through Syria. His
plan was to arouse all the nomad tribes in Syria, so that they
would be constantly harassing the Turkish army from within their
own lines.
Two miles outside Baalbek, Lawrence slid down from his camel, took
off his Arab costume, and swaggered boldly into the little town in
the uniform of a British officer without insignia. At this time
Baalbek was still several hundred miles north of the line dividing
Allenby’s forces from the Turks. The British were only a few miles
north of Jerusalem. The Turkish troops on the streets of Baalbek
saluted Lawrence as though he had been a German officer. But there
was nothing unusual in this, for if a Prussian officer of the
Death’s Head Hussars had passed Whitehall in London during the war,
he, no doubt, would have received the salute of the Horse Guards.
Lawrence’s theory was that it was a much simpler matter to go
boldly and openly in uniform in rural Turkey than to dodge about
in a suspicious manner. After hurriedly glancing over the
fortifications around Baalbek, Lawrence attempted to visit the
Turkish military school, where thousands of young officers were
being trained. But when he reached the gates he observed that
officers barred the way, and so he decided it would be safer to
retreat without exacting a salute.
Resuming his disguise, Lawrence went on to the tents of the
Metawileh, where he pulled aside his veil and revealed his identity.
The sheiks gathered around the new English “Prince of Mecca” and
clamored for a Syrian revolution at once. Lawrence explained that
the time was not yet ripe and tried to encourage them to future
action by glowing accounts of the victories farther south in the
Hedjaz. However, he found the Metawileh so keen for a raid or a
lark of some kind that he was prevailed upon to join them in what
he always referred to as “a cinema show.” In his contact with the
peoples of the desert he made the discovery that noise is one of
the best forms of propaganda. So that night, followed by every
able-bodied man, woman, and child in the tribe, Lawrence went down
to the main line of the Turkish railway, which runs from
Constantinople and Aleppo through Baalbek to Beirut. He selected
one of the largest steel and concrete bridges in the Near East as
the object of the evening’s diversion. After planting his tulips
under both ends of the bridge and all its bastions, he carried an
electric wire, connecting all charges, to the summit of a near-by
hill, which the people of the Metawileh were occupying as a grand
stand. Then, at the psychological moment, he threw in the switch
and sent the great bridge skyward in a mass of flame and smoke.
The Metawileh to the last man were convinced of the might of the
Allies and swore oaths by Allah the Most High and by the Holy
Koran, that they would join King Hussein’s Faithful.
From here Lawrence and his solitary Bedouin companion trekked
across Syria to Damascus. They rode through the bazaars by night
to the palace of Ali Riza Pasha, who was acting as military governor
for the Turks. Ali Riza, although one of the sultan’s highest
officials in Syria, secretly sympathized with the Arabian
Nationalist movement. That evening at dinner, over innumerable cups
of sweetened coffee, Ali Riza informed Lawrence that the growing
dissension between Turkish and German officials would assure the
ultimate success of the Allies in Palestine and Arabia. The Germans
had become so high and mighty in their own estimation that they
were treating the Turks like dogs. Consequently, feeling against
the Germans had become so bitter that whenever the German General
Staff gave an order the Turks would do their best to prevent its
execution. According to Ali Riza, Falkenhayn a few weeks previously
had advised the Turks to abandon both Palestine and Arabia and
retire to a line across Syria to the Mediterranean from Deraa, the
important railway junction south of Damascus. The German
field-marshal had given the Turks sound and valuable advice, but
the latter were as reluctant to accept it as they were to accept
Field-Marshal Falkenhayn himself as their commander-in-chief. As
a result of their having spurned his counsel they were so
overwhelmed a little later by the combined British and Arabian
forces that they not only lost all the region which Falkenhayn had
advised them to abandon but they also lost the city of Damascus
and the entire territory of Syria, which they otherwise might have
saved.
After a bountiful dinner and this illuminating interview with the
Ottoman governor of Damascus, Lawrence and Dahmi slipped into the
desert and made their way south into the Hauran, the country of
the Druses, a people who pitch their tents around a high mountain
called Jebel Druz. The Druses owe much of their tribal solidarity
to their peculiar religion, which is a secret faith built up around
the worship of Hakim, a mad sultan of Egypt of the Middle Ages.
The Turks have always had great difficulty in getting this
quarrelsome independent tribe to recognize Ottoman authority or
pay taxes to the sultan. Most of the desert Arabs have carried on
perpetual blood-feuds with them, but Lawrence called their
chieftains together and, with his inimitable gift for winning
friends, succeeded in convincing them that they should swear
allegiance to Feisal and hold themselves ready to coöperate with
his army when it approached Damascus.
There would have been no quarter for Lawrence had he made a single
false step. With his companion Dahmi, and Tallal, a Bedouin sheik
known to the far corners of Arabia, he rode all around Damascus,
Deraa, and the Hauran, making a reconnaissance of the Turkish lines
of defense. He explored the Turkish railway on three sides of the
junction at Deraa and took a mental note of important points on
the lines north, south, and west of the junction which it would be
necessary for him to cut when he made his ultimate advance against
Damascus. All this was walking right into danger, and only the
perfection of his disguise and his command of the dialects of the
country saved him from being suspected by the Turks and shot as an
ordinary spy. He had one extremely narrow escape. When strolling
nonchalantly along the streets of Deraa, dressed as Sheik Tallal’s
son, two soldiers of the sultan’s army stopped him at a bazaar and
arrested him on the charge of being a deserter from the Turkish
army. Every able-bodied Arab in the Ottoman Empire was supposed to
be under arms. They took him to headquarters and flogged him until
he fainted. Then they threw him out more dead than alive and
fearfully bruised. Sometime later he regained consciousness, and,
barely able to crawl, he made his escape under cover of night.
Masquerading as a woman also entailed many difficulties. At Amman,
in the hills of Moab, east of the Jordan, Lawrence went through
the Turkish lines disguised as a Bedouin Gipsy. He spent the
afternoon prowling about the defenses surrounding the railway
station, and, after deciding that it would be futile for his Arabs
to attempt to capture it on account of the size of the garrison
and the strength of the artillery, he started toward the desert.
A party of Turkish soldiers, who had been looking with favorable
eyes at the Bedouin “woman,” started in hot pursuit. For more than
a mile they followed Lawrence, trying to flirt with him and jeering
at him when he repulsed their advances.
One of the most important Turkish strongholds on the border of the
Arabian Desert was the town of Kerak, near the south end of the
Dead Sea. One night Lawrence, disguised as a Bedouin, went through
the Turkish lines with Sheik Trad Ibn Nueiris of the Beni Sakr
tribe and found that there happened to be only three hundred Turks
in the garrison at the moment. Lawrence and the sheik banqueted
that evening with one of Trad’s Kerak friends. In honor of their
distinguished visitors the Arab villagers dragged sheep and goats
into the streets, built large fires, and feasted and circled in
wild war-dance until the witching hour. The members of the Turkish
garrison were so frightened by this bold demonstration that they
locked themselves in their barracks! After the celebration, Lawrence
and his companion left Kerak and returned to Akaba. The result of
this unimportant little episode was that two thousand more Turkish
troops were withdrawn from the forces opposing Allenby in Palestine
and sent down to Kerak. Lawrence had attained the two objects that
he had in mind in making this extended and adventurous tour of
enemy territory: he had spread broadcast propaganda for the cause
of Arabian nationalism among the tribes that were still under
Turkish jurisdiction, and he had obtained information enough to
fill a book regarding the plans of the German High Command. He went
over the territory behind the Turkish lines so thoroughly that
during the final drive of the campaign he knew that part of the
country almost as intimately as the Turks themselves.