longer merely a British officer; his enthusiasm for the Revolt on its
own account had cut him off from that. Nor was he a genuine Arab, as
his tribelessness reminded him only too strongly. He hovered somewhere
midway between the one thing and the other like Mohammed’s coffin in
the fable. More immediately disturbing was the possibility of being
too ill to ride further, and so of falling into the hands of desert
tribesmen whose idea of medicine was to burn holes in the patient’s
body to let the evil spirits out: when the patient screamed they would
say that it was the devil in him protesting. Eventually he reached
Abdulla’s camp just in time to stave off the collapse. He gave Abdulla
Feisal’s message and then went off to lie in a tent where his weakness
kept him helpless for the next ten days.
This forced idleness had important results: though his body was
weak, his brain cleared and he began to think about the Arab Revolt
more carefully than he had yet done. It was something to do to keep his
mind off his physical condition. Hitherto he had acted from instinct,
never looking more than a step or two ahead at a time: now he could
exercise his reason. He remembered the military writers whose works he
had read at Oxford: he had not been required by his tutors to become
acquainted with any campaigns later than Napoleon’s, but he had, it
seems, out of curiosity read most of the more modern military writers,
such as the great Clausewitz, and von Moltke and the recent Frenchmen,
including Foch (whose _Principes de la Guerre_ had impressed him much
until he found that Foch had, without acknowledgment, lifted many of
his chief principles from an Austrian report on the 1866 campaign).
He began by recalling the main principle on which all these writers
agreed, that wars were won by destroying the enemy’s main army in
battle. But somehow it would not fit the Arab campaign; and this
worried him.
He began to ask himself why they were bothering to attack Medina. What
was the good of it to the Arabs if they captured it? It was no longer
a threat as it had been when there were troops in it to spare for the
attack on Mecca. It was no use as a base or a store-house. The Turks
in it were powerless to harm the Arabs, and were now eating their own
transport animals which they could no longer feed. Why not let them
keep the town? Why do more than continue to blockade it? What of the
railway, which used up a vast quantity of men in guard posts all down
the line and yet was too long to be properly defended? Why not be
content with frequent raids on it, between guard posts, blowing up
trains and bridges, and yet allowing it to be just—only just—kept
in working order, so that it would be a continual drain on the Turks to
the north to keep it going and to feed the troops in Medina? To cut it
permanently would be a mistake. The surrender of Medina would mean that
the captured Turks would have to be fed, many of the troops guarding
the railway would make their way back north, and the drain on the Turks
of men and trains and food would stop. The Allied cause would, in fact,
be best served by attracting and keeping as many Turkish troops as
possible in this unimportant theatre of war, and by using as many Arabs
as possible in the important theatre of war, which was Palestine.
When Lawrence got better, therefore, and left his stinking, fly-swarmed
tent he did not urge Abdulla to attack Medina but suggested a series
of pin-pricking raids against the railway, offering to set an example
in these himself. Abdulla was more a politician than a man of action
and more interested in field sports and practical joking than in
generalship. However, he permitted Sherif Shakir, his picturesque
half-Bedouin cousin, to make a raid against the nearest station on the
railway, a hundred miles away, with a party of Ateiba tribesmen and one
of the mountain-guns which the Egyptian gunners had left with Feisal
and which Feisal had lately sent to Abdulla as a present. Lawrence,
convalescent, went with Shakir, and, on the twenty-seventh of March,
laid his first mine, an automatic one, on the railway. Because it was
his first it was not very successful. He caught the front wheel of
a train all right, but the charge was not big enough to do serious
damage. Nor did Shakir succeed in his raid beyond killing a score
of Turks, damaging the water-tower and station buildings with his
gun, and setting a few wagons on fire; there was, that is to say, no
looting. The chief dramatic interest of the raid seems to have
centred round a shepherd boy who was captured by the Arabs and tied up
while his sheep, Turkish property, were eaten before his unhappy eyes.
However, Lawrence went again a day or two later with a party of Juheina
to experiment further in automatic mines: he was fortunate enough to
have a preliminary failure. A long train from Medina, full of women
and children, ‘useless mouths’ whom the Turks could not feed and so
were sending up to Syria, passed over the mine without exploding it.
There had been a cloudburst the day before, in which Lawrence and his
men had been caught, and the mechanism, owing probably to the slight
sinking of the ground after the rain, was not in touch with the rails.
He adjusted this when night came and, blowing up a few rails and a
small bridge to explain plausibly to the Turks (who had seen them and
were firing and blowing bugles all down the line) what he and the
tribesmen were about, went away and left the mine behind. It caught
the expected repair-train. Most of this story, the episodes of the two
months, March and April 1917, which are left blank in _Revolt in the
Desert_, are accessible, in greater detail, to inquisitive readers.
The _World’s Work_ magazine published them as an article in America in
1921. The fees for this contribution and three others following went
not to Lawrence but to keep a poet, who had lost money in an attempt to
start a grocery-shop, from the bankruptcy court. Lawrence took great
care, for some reason, not to let them appear in England; and as I was
the poet, and this book has the same text for England and America, the
details will not be given by me now.
The fruits of Lawrence’s visit to Abdulla, measured in action, were
small. Abdulla did not have his brother Feisal’s energy and
military keenness, and had been allotted an unattractive part in the
campaign, the blockade of Medina, which encouraged the inactive side
of his character. (The siege of the city was never pressed and dragged
on until after the Armistice in October 1918 when the commander,
Fakhri Pasha, was given orders from Constantinople to hand Medina over
to the Arab forces; and did so, compelled by a mutiny of his chief
staff-officers.) But, apart from action, Lawrence’s visit to Abdulla
was of considerable importance; it marked a turning-point in the Arab
campaign. His fortnight’s solitary thinking in that tent gave him
convictions: he decided on the tactics and strategy necessary if his
party were to achieve that success in the north which he regarded as
essential to justify the Arab Revolt. We find him acting hereafter
with great deliberation and confidence, in striking contrast to his
previous hesitating attitude as adviser to Feisal in the Yenbo and Wejh
operations. He had been right before, but more or less by luck.
On April the tenth Lawrence returned to Wejh by leisurely stages.
Abdulla had been very hospitable, but Lawrence preferred the atmosphere
of Feisal’s camp, where there was a more energetic spirit and a
determination to win the war with as little Allied help as possible. A
good way farther north on the railway than he had laid his mines there
were now two parties doing demolitions (Garland’s and Newcombe’s, and
Hornby’s), but the Turks would find it just a shade less difficult to
keep the railway going between Damascus and Medina than to arrange for
the long and dangerous march-out of the Medina garrison. At Wejh he
found things going on well. More armoured cars had come from Egypt, and
Yenbo and Rabegh had been emptied of their stores and men as a
proof that the Revolt was now safe in the south and was moving north.
The aeroplanes under Major Ross were here and also a new machine-gun
company of amusing history. When Yenbo was abandoned there were left
behind some heaps of broken weapons and two English armourer-sergeants.
Also thirty sick and wounded Arabs. The armourer-sergeants,
finding things boring, had dosed and healed the men and mended the
machine-guns, and combined them into a company. The sergeants knew no
Arabic but trained the men so well by dumb-show that they were as good
as the best company in the Arab army.
XIII
Lawrence was about to withdraw from Feisal’s tent at Wejh after the
exchange of news and greetings, when there was a stir of excitement. A
messenger came in and whispered to Feisal. Feisal turned to Lawrence
with shining eyes, trying to be calm, and said: ‘Auda is here.’ The
tent-flap was drawn back, and a deep voice boomed out salutations to
‘Our Lord, the Commander of the Faithful,’ then entered a tall strong
figure, with a haggard face, passionate and tragic. It was Auda; and
with him Mohammed, his only surviving son, a boy of eleven years old,
already a fighting man. Feisal had sprung to his feet, an honour not
due to Auda on account of his rank, for nobler chiefs had been received
sitting, but because he was Auda, the greatest fighting man in Arabia.
Auda caught Feisal’s hand and kissed it; then they drew aside a pace
or two and looked at each other, a splendidly unlike pair, Feisal the
prophet, and Auda the warrior, each true to his type. They had an
immediate understanding and liking for each other at this first meeting.
[Illustration:
description: Portrait drawing 3⁄4 view chest up of a man in Arab
dress
caption: AUDA
_from a drawing by_ ERIC KENNINGTON
]
Auda was simply dressed in white cotton robes and a red headcloth.
He looked over fifty and his black hair was streaked with white: yet
he was straight and vigorous, and as active as a much younger man.
His hospitality was such that only very hungry guests did not find it
inconvenient; his generosity kept him poor in spite of the profits
of a hundred raids. He had married twenty-eight times, and had been
wounded thirteen times. He had killed seventy-five men with his own
hand in battle and never a man except in battle. These were all Arabs;
Turks he did not count and could not guess at the score. Nearly all his
family and kin had been killed in the wars which he had provoked.
He made a point of being at enmity with nearly all the tribes of the
desert so that he might have proper scope for raids, which he made as
often as possible. There was always an element of foresight in his
maddest adventures, and his patience in battle was great. If he got
angry his face would twitch uncontrollably and he would burst into a
fit of shaking passion which could only be calmed by battle: at such
times he was like a wild beast and men fled from his presence. Nothing
on earth could make him change his mind or obey an order or do anything
of which he disapproved. He saw life as an epic in which he took a
leading part, though indeed he believed his ancestors even mightier men
than himself. His mind was stored with old ballads of battle, and he
was always singing them in his great voice to the nearest listener or
to the empty air. He spoke of himself in the third person and was so
sure of his fame that he would even shout out stories against himself.
He had a demon of mischief worse even than Lawrence’s and in public
gatherings would say the most reckless or tactless things that he could
find to say: more than that, he would invent and utter on oath dreadful
tales of the private life of his hosts or guests. Yet even those whom
he most embarrassed loved him warmly; for he was modest, simple as a
child, honest, kind-hearted.
I heard the following story from a friend who was present at a state
banquet given after the War at Maan in Transjordania when Sir Herbert
Samuel, who had just been made High Commissioner of Palestine, was
introduced to all the great chiefs of the district. Sir Herbert,
somewhat shaken by an attempt that had just been made on his
life, was glad of Lawrence’s chance presence as interpreter. In his
speech he trusted that the great chief Auda (turning towards him) was
pleased with the settlement of the Turkish empire and hoped that a long
reign of peace had begun in the East. Lawrence translated this into
Arabic, and Auda burst out violently in answer, ‘What peace so long as
the French are in Syria, the English in Mesopotamia, and the Jews in
Palestine?’ Lawrence, with equal mischief, translated this literally
into English, without turning a hair. Fortunately Sir Herbert was
content to answer with a smile.
Auda had come down to Wejh chafing at the delay of the campaign,
anxious only to spread the bounds of Arab freedom to his own desert
lands. The weight of anxiety was off the minds of Feisal and Lawrence
before even they sat down to supper. It was a cheerful meal but
suddenly interrupted by Auda, who leaped up with a loud ‘God forbid!’
and ran from the tent. A loud hammering was heard outside and the rest
of the company stared at each other. It was Auda pounding his false
teeth to fragments on a stone. I had forgotten, he explained, that
Jemal Pasha (the Turkish commander in Syria who had hanged so many of
the Arab leaders) ‘gave me these. I was eating my Lord Feisal’s bread
with Turkish teeth!’ As a result Auda, having few teeth of his own,
went about half-nourished for two months until a dentist was sent from
Egypt to make him an Allied set.
Auda and Lawrence liked each other at first sight. The irony of their
friendship has never been properly appreciated. From his schooldays
onward, the greater part of Lawrence’s imaginative life seems to have
been lived in the mediæval romances of Frankish and Norman chivalry.
This was not a light passing romanticism, for Lawrence’s
Irish-Hebridean blood would not allow such a thing: light romanticism
is an English trait. It was, as I have said, an incurable romanticism
which is at times not to be distinguished from realism. An English
schoolboy is content to play for awhile at being a knight of the Round
Table out of the _Idylls of the King_, or a jousting baron out of
_Ivanhoe_; but later to dismiss the game as a stupidity and take to
football, cigarette-smoking and the appreciation of cinema-actresses.
Lawrence did nothing of the sort. Instead he went behind Tennyson’s
Victorian sentimentality to the bolder and finer _Morte D’Arthur_
of Malory; nor was he content to play at being a knight of the Holy
Grail without binding himself, for the sake of personal efficiency,
to the same rules of chastity and temperance and gentleness that
Malory’s Galahad had kept; he certainly kept and keeps a knightly sense
of honour as strictly as a Geraint, or a Walter de Manny. He went
behind Scott’s false mediævalism in search of the real mediævalism;
made an intense study of ancient armour and cathedrals and castles;
read old French, studied the Crusades in the Holy Land itself. As
an undergraduate he told a friend that in his opinion the world had
virtually come to an end in 1500, destroyed by gunpowder and cheap
printing. Lawrence so logically pursued his romantic career, which
began by putting his nose between the pages of Scott and Tennyson, and
then between those of Morris and Malory, and then between those of the
original mediæval French and Latin romances, that at last he forced his
whole head and shoulders and body between the pages of an epic in the
making, and in the first book met Feisal, and in the second Auda.
This would have been all very well if Lawrence’s mediævalism had
been natural as Auda’s was, the Middle Ages being not yet over in
Arabia when he was born. But in his struggle against the forces of
false romanticism, to avoid becoming a second Don Quixote, Lawrence
had to arm himself with a careful twentieth-century scepticism which
he continually used in test of his behaviour; true mediævalism was
often cynical, never sceptical. It is, therefore, interesting to note
that he carried three books with him throughout the Arabian campaign.
The first was Malory’s _Morte D’Arthur_; but the second was the
comedies of Aristophanes, whose laughing scepticism, especially in
his anti-militaristic _Lysistrata_, provides a fine antidote to false
romanticism.
His choice of a third book was equally interesting—the _Oxford Book of
English Verse_, a collection which, in my opinion, gives the poetry
it contains too strong an atmosphere of literary artistry. Perhaps I
should have added to my portrait of Lawrence that his blind desire to
be a literary artist is the more to be wondered at because he might
well be something better than a mere artist. Artistic writing comes
from a competitive literary atmosphere and should be the last thing
on earth for Lawrence to aim at; the pursuit of ‘style’ is a social
practice of the vulgarest sort. Lawrence may be excused for carrying
this anthology (which is no worse than most other anthologies and
weighs little when printed on India paper) if he chose it merely as a
mixed potpourri of the English poets, faintly recalling the true smell
of each individual. But I do not believe that this was the case; for a
straining after literary artistry is one of his characteristics. The
justification of the literary epic that came out of this adventure, his
_Seven Pillars_, is that where the pursuit of style is forgotten in
the excitement of story-telling there is clean and beautiful writing,
and that where it is not forgotten one feels that Lawrence is
admitting an unfortunate taint, the suppression of which would be
a suppression of part of the truth about himself. He has, in fact,
only been able to keep his integrity by confessing to an occasional
weakness. But of this more later. The influence of the _Oxford Book of
English Verse_ on his feelings and actions during the campaign would be
well worth studying. The copy survives with marginal annotations, many
of these dated.
At all events, Auda accepted Lawrence as a fellow-mediævalist (the
shadow of the Crusades happily not falling between them) and Lawrence
was content in his company and went through the next book of the epical
romance with only occasional critical doubts about himself. There was
need for true epic action if Akaba was to be taken, for it was a feat
beyond the scope of unheroic twentieth-century soldiering. So the two
took counsel together for a journey northward to catch Auda’s Howeitat
in their spring pastures of the Syrian desert: they would raise a
camel-corps there and take Akaba by surprise from the east without guns
or machine-guns. This would mean an encircling march of six hundred
miles to capture a position which was within gun-fire of the British
Fleet—which indeed was raiding the port at the moment. Yet the longest
way was the only way; for Akaba was so strongly protected by the hills,
elaborately fortified for miles back, that if a landing were attempted
from the sea a small Turkish force could hold up a whole Allied
division in the defiles. On the other hand, the Turks had never thought
of facing their fortifications east against attack from inland. Auda’s
men could probably rush them easily with help of neighbouring clans
of Howeitat from the coast and in the hills. The importance of
Akaba was great. It was a constant threat to the British Army which had
now reached the Gaza-Beersheba line and therefore left it behind the
right flank: a small Turkish force from Akaba could do great damage
and might even strike at Suez. But Lawrence saw that the Arabs needed
Akaba as much and more than the British. If they took it, they could
link up with the British Army at Beersheba, and show by their presence
that they were a real national army, one to be reckoned with. Nothing
but actual contact could ever convince the British that the Arabs were
really worth considering as allies, and once the contact was made,
there would be no more difficulty about guns, money and equipment:
the Arab campaign would no longer be a side-show but part of the main
battle, and the British would feed it properly.
Lawrence discussed with the British officers at Wejh, Feisal’s
advisers, the tactics that had occurred to him while he was lying
sick in Abdulla’s camp. It must always be remembered that Lawrence,
though the Englishman most respected by the Arabs, was not the only one
fighting in Arabia, and, more than that, was not even a senior officer.
On this occasion his views were disregarded. It had been decided some
weeks before, chiefly on Lawrence’s impulse, to march the whole force
inland from Wejh and occupy a large stretch of the pilgrims’ railway
with mixed Egyptian and Arab troops; all arrangements had been made
and it was hoped that Medina would soon surrender. But Lawrence had
changed his mind: he now argued, against this scheme, that it had been
found bad policy to mix Egyptians and Arabs, that the Arabs could
not be trusted to attack or defend a line or a point against regular
troops, that the country which they proposed to hold was barren, and
that to force the Turks to waste men and arms and food in holding
Medina and the railway line would harm them more than any military
defeat that could be inflicted on them. However, plans were already
too far advanced, and Lawrence could do nothing to sidetrack the
expedition. He decided to go off on his own to take Akaba and to ask
his seniors for no help in arms or stores that would in any way weaken
their own expedition.
Feisal was his stand-by (Feisal thought and planned and worked for
every one) and gave him twenty-two thousand pounds in gold from his own
purse to pay the wages of the party and of all the new men enrolled
during the journey. Sherif Nasir, usual leader of forlorn hopes, was
in command. Seventeen Ageyl went as escort, and to deal with the
Syrian Arab converts in the north came Zeki and Nesib, both important
men of Damascus. The gold was shared out between Nasir, Auda, Nesib
and Zeki. The party started on May the ninth; every man carried a
forty-five-pound bag of flour with him as his rations for six weeks.
There were a few spare rifles for presents, and six camel-loads of
blasting gelatine for blowing up rails, trains or bridges in the north.
It seemed a small force to go out to win a new province, and so thought
the French representative with Feisal, who rode up to take a farewell
photograph. Auda was worth photographing; he was dressed in finery
that he had bought at Wejh—a mouse-coloured greatcoat of broadcloth
with a velvet collar, and yellow elastic-sided boots. Nasir was the
guide and knew this country almost as well as his own; after two years
of fighting and preaching always beyond the front line of Feisal’s
armies he was very weary and sunken in spirit. He talked sorrowfully to
Lawrence of his beautiful home in Medina, the great cool house and its
gardens planted with every sort of fruit-tree, the shady avenues,
the vine-trellised swimming tank, the deep well with its wheel turned
by oxen, the many fountains. Now, he said, the blight of the Turks was
on the place: his fruit-trees were wasted, his palms chopped down. Even
the great well, which had sounded with the creak of the wheel for six
hundred years, had fallen silent; the garden, cracked with heat, was
becoming as waste as the hills over which he now rode.
The baggage-camels went slowly, weak with the mange that was the curse
of Wejh, grazing all the way. The riders were tempted to hurry them
but Auda said no; because of the long ride before them they must go
slowly and spare their beasts. This was a country of white sand which
dazzled the eyes cruelly, and they were glad when they came to a small
oasis in a valley where an old man, his wife and daughters, the only
inhabitants, had a garden among the palm-trees. They grew tobacco,
beans, melons, cucumbers, egg-plants, and worked day and night without
much thought of the world outside. The old man laughed at his visitors,
asking what more to eat and drink all this fighting and suffering would
bring; he could not understand their talk of Arab liberty. He only
lived for his garden. Every new year he sold his tobacco and bought a
shirt for himself, and one each for his household; his felt cap, his
only other garment, had been his grandfather’s a century before.
[Illustration:
description: Map of the Sinai area
title caption: THE RIDE TO AKABA
May 9–July 6: 1917
]