their correspondence with the Turks. Auda began to laugh, Mohammed
looked disgusted. Then they explained, telling a farcical story of how
Mohammed had wanted to get money from the Turks by a confidence trick
and had therefore taken Auda’s seal and written to the Governor of Maan
offering to desert to the Turks if he were given money. A large sum was
gladly sent on account, but Auda had waylaid the messenger, taken the
spoils and was now denying Mohammed his share. Lawrence laughed with
them over the story but knew that more lay behind it; the fact was,
they had been angry that no guns or troops had yet arrived since Akaba
had been taken a month before, and that no rewards had been given them
for their part in it. Auda, feeling sorry for the Turks whom he had
beaten so badly, was quite ready to fight on their side for a change:
it was generosity rather than treachery with him. But both Auda and
Mohammed were surprised at Lawrence’s knowledge, wanting to know how
he came by it and how much more he knew. He laughed at them, quoting,
as if they were his own words, actual phrases of the letters that had
been exchanged, and made them feel uncomfortable. Then he told them
casually that Feisal’s entire army was coming up, and that Allenby
was sending rifles, guns, high-explosive, food and money. Finally he
added that Auda’s present expenses in hospitality must be great; would
it help if something were advanced of the great gift that Feisal was
bringing up to him? Auda agreed cheerfully to accept the advance and
with it to keep the Howeitat well fed and cheerful. So Lawrence went
back to Akaba, took ship back to Egypt and reported that there was no
treachery at Guweira: everything was going on well there. But he did
not explain the whole story; Headquarters would not have understood it.
XVII
While waiting for Feisal’s army to come up Lawrence began getting his
thoughts in order again. The war in Arabia was as good as over and
Feisal’s army, now under the wing of Allenby, was about to take part
in the military deliverance of Syria. Syria Lawrence knew well. He had
wandered up and down in it before the War, from city to city and tribe
to tribe; he had even written a book about it. Syria was a fertile
strip of land running between the eastern coast of the Mediterranean
and the great Syrian desert, with a backbone of mountains dividing it.
It had been for centuries a corridor between Arabia and Europe, Asia
and Egypt, and held at one time or another by Turks, Greeks, Romans,
Egyptians, Arabs, Persians, Assyrians and Hittites. It was naturally
divided up into sections by the mountain spurs, and the constant
passing to and fro of armies had filled the land with an extraordinary
variety of peoples—to almost every valley a different population, each
little colony kept separate from its neighbours by the spurs between.
There were Circassians, Kurds, Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Persians,
Algerians, Jews, Arabians, and many more, with as many varieties of
religion among them as of race.
The six principal cities, Jerusalem, Beyrout, Damascus, Homs, Hama and
Aleppo, were also each of them entirely different in character. The
only possible bond between most of these pieces of the Syrian mosaic
was the common language, Arabic, and though at this time there was
much talk of Arab freedom, it was impossible to think of Syria as a
national unity. Freedom to the Syrians meant local home-rule for each
little community in its valley or city, but a freedom impossible in
modern civilization where roads, railways, taxes, armies, a postal
system, supplies have all to be maintained by a central government.
And whatever central government might be imposed on Syria, even though
Arabic were the official language, would be a foreign government; for
there was no such thing as a true or typical Syrian. How to spread
the Revolt up to Damascus over this chequer-board of communities each
divided against its neighbour naturally by geography and history, and
artificially by Turkish intrigue was a most baffling problem: which
however Lawrence set himself to solve.
It was difficult to do anything on the Mediterranean side of the
central mountain-range, where the mixed population was Europeanized and
could probably not be converted to the idea of an Arab confederation
with its headquarters in the ancient Arab capital of Damascus; it
would prefer a French or English protectorate. But inland, between the
mountains and the desert where the tribes were simpler and wilder, the
national ideal might well be preached. Lawrence decided then to build
up a ladder of friendly tribes in Eastern Syria beginning at the south
with the Howeitat, for three hundred miles until Azrak was reached,
half-way to Damascus. It was the method that had been used before in
Arabia from Jiddah through Rabegh, Yenbo, Wejh to Akaba. Once they were
at Azrak, the Arabs of the Hauran would probably rise in sympathy; the
Hauran being a huge fertile land, just south of Damascus, populous with
warlike self-reliant Arab peasantry. This rising should end the war.
Once more the tactics should be tip and run, not the regular advance
of an organized army, and for this the eastern desert was most
convenient. One might look on it as a sort of sea in which to manœuvre
with camel-parties instead of ships. The railway, to cover it from
the British Fleet, had been built down the eastern side of the
central mountains and could be raided from the desert without fear of
retaliation, for the Turks had no camel-corps worth anything, and in
any case no important point to strike back against. From the war in
the south Lawrence had learned that the best tactics were to use the
smallest raiding parties on the fastest camels, and to strike at points
widely separated with the most portable weapons of destruction. These
weapons would be high-explosive for demolition work and light automatic
guns, Hotchkiss or Lewis, which could be fired from the saddle of a
camel running at eighteen miles an hour. Lawrence at once begged for
quantities of these from Egypt.
The difficulty of the campaign was that, though all the tribes might
join in the Revolt, their jealousies were such that no tribe could
fight in a neighbour’s territory and no tribal combinations were
possible as they had been in Arabia. Feisal’s authority in Syria was
not great enough to heal the feuds. This meant that the brunt of the
fighting had to be borne by a small force of Ageyl and others from
the south, against whom, as distant strangers under the command of
members of the Prophet’s family, there was not so much prejudice. It
was impossible for the Turks to foresee the strength and direction of
the attacks: the camels could, after a watering, travel two hundred
and fifty miles in three days; and in an emergency could go a hundred
and ten miles in twenty-four hours. (Twice Lawrence’s famous Ghazala
did one hundred and forty-three miles of a march alone with him.)
This meant that it might not be impossible to strike at points near
Maan on Monday, near Amman on Thursday, near Deraa on Saturday, and
to get fresh tribesmen and camels from each district to join in the
attack. Above all, the regular raiders must be self-supporting.
From Akaba they could go out with six-weeks’ flour-ration and
ammunition, explosive and gold, and do without the complicated system
of supply-trains and dumps which slows down the pace and shortens the
fighting range of every regular army.
There must be no discipline in the ordinary sense of a chain of
command going down from general to colonel, to captain, to lieutenant,
to sergeant, to corporal, to private; every man must be his own
commander-in-chief, ready, if need be, for single combat against the
enemy without waiting for orders from above or co-operation from his
fellows. And discipline could not in any case have been enforced: the
Arabs were independent by nature and were serving voluntarily. Honour
was the only contract and every man was free to draw his pay up to date
and go home at any time he liked; only the Ageyl and the small regular
army under Jaafar were serving for a definite term, so that the war
when fought was fought with goodwill. There were no shameful incidents
like those on the Western Front where the first dead man that I saw was
an English suicide, and the last one also.
Mr. Herbert Read, by the way, has made a rather unfortunate critical
condemnation of Lawrence’s _Seven Pillars_ as being an account of a
campaign where men did not heroically suffer the machine-made boredom
and agony of the Western trenches, and which therefore can hardly be
taken seriously. This reads like a glorification of the more horrible
sort of war at the expense of the less horrible, which cannot be
what Mr. Read (an anti-militarist, and for good reason) intends. If
he wishes to point out that all war is evil in itself, whatever its
glamour, he should not complicate his argument by a false comparison of
heroisms.
[Illustration:
description: Map of area around Dead Sea with Lawrence’s travel
paths indicated
title caption: LAWRENCE’S RIDES
]
Six weeks had elapsed since the capture of Akaba, and the Arabs
had had opportunity to strengthen themselves. Feisal and Jaafar had
now arrived at Akaba with the army. Plentiful supplies were landed
from Egypt and armoured cars and guns—though the long-range guns never
arrived until the last month of the war—and Egyptian labourers to
rebuild the town and turn round the fortifications to face inland.
The defiles through the hills were strongly held. On the other hand,
the Turks had also been busy and had the advice of the German general
Falkenhayn who had been chiefly responsible for saving them two years
before at the Dardanelles. They had sent down a whole division to Maan
and fortified it until it was quite secure against attack except by
the strong regular forces and heavy guns which the Arabs did not have.
There was an aeroplane-station there now and great supply dumps.
It was probable that the Turks would try to retake Akaba by way of Aba
el Lissan and Guweira. They had already pushed their way up to Aba el
Lissan and fortified it while cavalry held the neighbouring hills.
But Lawrence knew that Akaba was safe enough. He would even welcome a
Turkish attempt on it, which could only end in great losses. There were
Arab posts out north and south of the pass, and old Maulud with his
mule-mounted regiment had taken up his position in the ancient ruins of
Petra north of Maan and was encouraging the local tribes to raid the
Turkish communications in competition with their rivals at Delagha, a
few miles to their south. Raiding went on for weeks and the Turks got
more and more irritated. To prick them into retaliation a long distance
air-raid was made on Maan, from El Arish on the left of the British
Army.
Thirty-two bombs were dropped about breakfast-time in and about
the unprepared station: the aeroplanes flew dangerously low but
returned safely the same morning to a temporary landing-ground thirty
miles north of Akaba where the airmen patched up the shrapnel-torn
wings of their machines. Two of their bombs had struck the barracks and
killed a number of Turks, eight struck the engine-shed, doing great
damage, one fell in the General’s kitchen, four on the aerodrome. The
next morning they visited Aba el Lissan, bombed the horse-lines and
stampeded the animals, and then the tents and stampeded the Turks. The
same afternoon they decided to look for the battery of guns that had
troubled them that morning; there was just enough petrol and bombs.
Skimming the hill-crest they came over Aba el Lissan at a height of
only three hundred feet. They interrupted the Turks’ usual midday
sleep and took the place completely by surprise. They dropped thirty
bombs, silenced the battery and were off again. The Turkish commander
at Maan set his men digging bomb-proof shelters and dispersed his
aeroplanes, when they had been repaired, for fear of a fresh attack on
the aerodrome.
The next plan that Lawrence had for the Arabs was to reduce the troops
that the Turks could spare for the Akaba attack by making frequent
raids on the railway and so forcing them to defend it more strongly.
The gloomy reaction after Aba el Lissan had long passed and left him
adventurous as before and ready to kill without remorse. He thought
out a series of demolitions for mid-September; it might be a good
idea, too, to mine another train. He would try for one at a station
called Mudowwara, eighty miles south of Maan, where a smashed train
would greatly embarrass the enemy. Now, to make sure of the train
new methods had to be found: the automatic mine was uncertain and
might be set off by a trolley or by a train carrying civilian
refugees which they would want to let pass; or, if the Turks put the
engines to push instead of to pull the trains, might only explode
under an unimportant wagon: and the train could then retire safely.
What was wanted seemed to be a mine that could be exploded at will by
electricity. The apparatus was sent to him from Egypt and explained
by electricians on the guard-ship at Akaba. It consisted of a heavy
white box, the exploder, and yards of heavy cable insulated with
rubber. With the engine blown up and the train perhaps derailed,
machine-guns and artillery would be needed to complete the destruction.
For machine-guns, the Lewis guns would have to do, but artillery was
a problem because to take along even the smallest mountain-guns meant
slow travelling. Lawrence then thought of the Stokes trench-mortars
which had lately been used successfully in France. They were simple
guns, like small drain-pipes, tilted at an angle on a tripod. Down the
mouth a heavy shell was allowed to slide, and when it struck the bottom
a charge in its base was fired and it went flying two or three hundred
yards and burst according to a time-fuse. This was not too short a
range for a railway ambush and the Stokes shell was powerfully charged
with ammonal.
Two sergeant-instructors were sent from Egypt to teach the Arabs at
Akaba how to use these weapons. The one in charge of the Lewis guns was
an Australian; reckless, talkative, tall and supple. The Stokes-mortar
sergeant was an English countryman; slow, stocky, workmanlike and
silent. Lawrence knew them as Lewis and Stokes, naming them after their
guns. They were excellent instructors and though they knew no Arabic
taught the tribesmen by dumb-show, until in a month’s time they could
use the guns reasonably well.
Lawrence decided that his raid might include an attack on
Mudowwara station. It was not strongly held, and three hundred men
might rush it at night and destroy the deep well there. Without its
water, the only plentiful supply in the dry hot section below Maan, the
trains would have to waste their wagon-space in carrying water-tanks.
Lewis was anxious to join in the raid; he was sick of being a mere
instructor at the base in Egypt and wanted to do some fighting. Stokes
said that he would come too. Lawrence warned them what to expect, of
hunger, heat and weariness, and explained that if anything happened to
him it might go badly with them alone with the Arabs. This warning only
excited Lewis and did not put off Stokes. Lawrence lent them two of his
best camels.
So they started on September the seventh, riding up to Guweira where
they collected some of Auda’s Howeitat tribesmen. Lawrence was at
first afraid that the heat would be too much for the sergeants. The
granite walls of the valley down which they rode were burningly hot;
a few days before in the cooler palm-gardens of Akaba beach the
thermometer had shown a hundred and twenty degrees. It was now even
hotter. As neither of the sergeants had ever been on a camel before
he let them take the ride easily. He was amused at the way that they
behaved with the Arabs. Lewis, the Australian, seemed at home from the
first and behaved freely towards the Arabs, but was astonished when
they treated him as equals; he could not have imagined that they would
forget the social difference between a white man and a brown. This
race prejudice, however, would soon wear off: meanwhile the joke was
that Lewis was burned a good deal browner than any of the Arabs. On
the other hand, Stokes, the Englishman, remained insular and his shy
correctness reminded the Arabs all the time that he was not one of
them. They treated him with respect and called him ‘sergeant,’ whereas
Lewis was merely ‘the long fellow.’ Lawrence found them typical of the
two opposite kinds of Englishmen in the East: the kind that allowed
themselves to be influenced by native customs and thought in order to
be able the more easily to impose their will on the country; and the
kind that became more English by reacting against native customs and
thought. Lawrence being an extreme instance of the former type, to the
point of identifying himself at times with the Arabs rather than with
the English, seems to have felt a sneaking regard for the John Bull
constancy of Sergeant Stokes.
When they came near Guweira a Turkish aeroplane droned over and the
party at once rode off the open road into bushy country where the
camels would not be seen. It was a daily aeroplane that never did
much damage but provided the idle Guweira camp with excitement and
conversation. They halted, still in the saddle, until the aeroplane
had dropped its three bombs and returned to its own lines near Maan.
Lawrence found the Howeitat all at odds. Auda who drew the wages for
the whole tribe, only a clan of which he ruled personally, was using
his power to compel the smaller clans to accept him as their leader.
This they resented, threatening either to go home or to join the Turks.
Feisal had sent up a sherif, a close kinsman, to settle the dispute,
but Auda was obstinate, knowing how much the success of the Revolt
depended on him. Now some of the clans from the south towards Mudowwara
were about to desert the cause, and they were the very men on whom
Lawrence was counting for help in his operations; but Auda would not
give way. However, he told Lawrence to ride forward some miles
with his twenty baggage-camels and halt to wait events.
They went, glad to leave behind the swarms of flies that plagued
them at Guweira. Lawrence much admired the way that the sergeants
stood the stifling heat, the worst that they had ever experienced; it
was like a metal mask over the face. Not to lower themselves in the
Arabs’ estimation, they did not utter a word of complaint. They were,
however, ignorant of Arabic or they would have known that the Arabs
were themselves making a great fuss about it. Rumm, a place of springs,
half-way to Mudowwara, should have been their first halt, but they went
on by easy stages, stopping the night in a grove of rustling tamarisk
under a tall red cliff. In the very early morning, while the stars
were still shining, Lawrence was roused by the Arab commander of the
expedition, one of the Harith, a poor member of the Prophet’s family.
He crept up shivering and said, ‘Lord, I have gone blind.’ Blindness
for an Arab was a worse fate than for a European and the sherif must
now look forward to a life of complete blankness. However, he would
not go home; he could ride, he said, though he could not shoot, and he
would make this his last adventure and, with God’s help, would retire
from active life at least with the consolation of a victory.
They rode for hours the next day through the valley of Rumm, a broad
tamarisk-grown avenue two miles wide between colossal red sandstone
cliffs. They rose a sheer thousand feet on either side, not in an
unbroken wall, but seemed built in vertical sections like a row of
skyscrapers. There were caverns high up like windows and others at the
foot like doors. At the top were domes of a greyer rock. The pygmy
caravan passing down this street for giants felt awed and kept quite
silent. Towards sunset there was a break in the cliffs to the
right, leading to the water. They turned in here and found themselves
in a vast oval amphitheatre floored with damp sand and dark shrubs.
The entrance was only three hundred yards wide, which made the place
more impressive still. At the foot of the enclosing precipices were
enormous fallen blocks of sandstone, bigger than houses, and along a
ledge at one side grew trees. A little path zigzagged up to the ledge
and there, three hundred feet above the level of the plain, jetted the
water-springs. They watered their camels here and cooked rice to add to
the bully beef which the sergeants had brought, with biscuits, as their
ration.
Coffee was also prepared for visitors: they had heard Arab voices
shouting in the distance at the other end of the place. The visitors
soon arrived, head-men of the several Howeitat clans, all boiling
with anger and jealousy against Auda. They suspected Lawrence of
sympathizing with Auda’s attempt to force them to offer him their
allegiance; they refused to help Feisal further until he gave them
assurance that they would be allowed complete independence as clans.
Lawrence had to do the entertaining that night in place of the blinded
sherif; the awkwardness of the occasion made his task doubly difficult.
One of the head-men, by name Gasim abu Dumeik, a fine horseman who had
led the hill-men at Aba el Lissan, was particularly furious in his
denouncement of Auda. Lawrence singled him out for a verbal battle and
finally silenced him. The other head-men, for shame, gradually veered
round to Lawrence’s side and spoke of riding with him the next day to
Mudowwara. Lawrence then said that Zaal would arrive the next day and
that the two of them would accept help from all the clans except Gasim
abu Dumeik’s. And that the good services of this clan would be wiped
from Feisal’s book because of Gasim’s words and it would forfeit
all the honour and rewards that it had earned. Gasim withdrew from the
fireside, swearing to go over to the Turks at once. The cautious others
tried in vain to stop his mouth. Next morning he was there with his
men ready to join or oppose the expedition as the whim went. While he
hesitated Zaal arrived and the pair had a violent quarrel. Lawrence
and one or two more got between them and stopped the fight: the other
chiefs then came quietly up in two’s and three’s as volunteers, begging
Lawrence to assure Feisal of their loyalty.
He decided to go to Feisal at once to explain matters and, commending
the sergeants to Zaal, who answered for their lives with his own, rode
off hurriedly with a single attendant to Akaba. He found a short cut
and reached Akaba in six hours. Feisal was alarmed to see him back so
soon, but the affair was soon explained and Feisal at once appointed
a distinguished member of his family to go to Rumm as mediator. The
sherif rode back to Rumm with Lawrence and there, gathering together
the Arabs, including Gasim, began to smooth over their difficulties
and persuade them to peace. Gasim, no longer defiant but sulky,
would not make any public statement, so about a hundred men of the
smaller clans dared defy him by promising to join the raid. This was
better than nothing, but Lawrence had hoped for at least a force of
three hundred to deal successfully with the station. And there was
no suitable leader now that the sherif was blinded. Gasim would have
done, had he been willing. Zaal was the only other possible choice,
but he was too closely related to Auda not to be suspected; and he was
too sharp-tongued and sneering for even his good advice to be taken
willingly. On the sixteenth of September, therefore, the party started
out, without a leader.