nothing to do with the war, made a profound impression on Lawrence. He
was bathing in a little rock-pool, under one of the lesser springs—his
first freshwater bathe for many weeks—lying in the clear water and
letting the stream wash away the dirt and sweat of travel. His clothes
were in the sun on the rock-ledge, put there for the heat to chase out
the vermin. An old grey-bearded ragged man suddenly appeared, with
a face of great power and weariness, and sat down upon Lawrence’s
clothes, not seeming to notice them or him. At last he spoke and
said: ‘The love is from God; and of God; and towards God.’ It was the
strangest thing that Lawrence had ever heard in Arabia. The connection
of God with Love was an idea quite foreign to the country. God was
Justice, or God was Power or Fear, but never Love. Christianity was
not a wholly Semitic creed, but a grafting of Greek idealism upon
the hard Law of Moses, the typical Semite. It was this Greek element
that had enabled it to sweep over non-Semitic Europe. Galilee, where
Christianity originated, was half-Greek: at Gadara (of the swine) there
was a Greek university of which St. James seems to have been a student,
and with whose doctrines his Master was almost certainly familiar. But
the old man at Rumm was a puzzle; he was a tribesman, a true Arab, and
his brief sentence seemed to contradict all that seemed eternally fixed
in the Semite nature. Lawrence afterwards invited the old man to the
evening meal, hoping that he would utter doctrine, but he would only
groan and mutter, and the riddle remained unsolved. The Arabs said that
he was always so. All his life long he had wandered about, moaning
strange things, not troubling himself for food or work or shelter.
He was given charity by the tribes in pity of his poverty and
madness, but never answered a word or talked aloud except when out by
himself or alone among the sheep and goats.
The ride from Rumm began unpropitiously; though half an hour after
starting some shamefaced men of Gasim’s clan rode out to join them,
unable to endure the sight of others raiding without them. There was
no common feeling between the different little parties that made up
the force. Zaal was admittedly the most experienced fighter among them
and yet the other sullen chiefs would not even allow him to settle the
order of the march. Lawrence spent all his time riding up and down the
column from one chief to the other trying to draw them together for
the common purpose. He was treated by them with some respect, both as
Feisal’s deputy and as the owner of Ghazala, though Ghazala was that
day matched with the only other camel in Northern Arabia better than
herself, a beast called El Jedha, ridden by one Motlog, her old owner.
El Jedha had been a year or two before the sole occasion of a big
tribal war.
XVIII
It fell on Lawrence then to be the leader, a task to which he was
opposed on principle. He had from the first made a point of letting the
Arabs run their own campaign as far as possible by themselves: he was
merely their technical adviser and assistant. But he now constantly
found himself forced into leadership, not only because of his obvious
qualities as a desert fighter and outwitter of the Turks, but because
of his freedom from tribal complications, his whole-hearted zeal for
the Revolt, his disregard of loot and distinctions, his generosity
and tact. Yet, again, he was a most unsuitable commander of a Bedouin
raid. It meant his deciding such difficult questions as food-halts,
pasturage, road-direction, pay, disputes, division of spoil, feuds
and march-order. To be an efficient leader in this sense would mean
a lifetime’s training. However, he managed that day without mishap
and was rewarded at night by seeing the party sit down at only three
camp-fires. Around one were Lawrence’s own men, including three Syrian
peasants of the Hauran, from whom he intended to learn on the road such
things as would be useful to him later when the Revolt was carried up
to their country. At the second fire was Zaal with his twenty-five
famous camel-riders. At the third were the other jealous clansmen from
Rumm. Late at night, when hot bread and gazelle-meat had made tempers
better, it was possible for Lawrence to gather all the chiefs together
at his own neutral hearth to discuss the next day’s fighting. It was
decided to water the next evening at a well in a covered valley two
or three miles the near side of Mudowwara station; and from there go
forward to see whether it could be taken with the few men that they had.
Next day, then, they reached the well, an open pool a few yards
square. It looked uninviting. There was a green slime over the water
with queer bladder-like islands on it, fatty-pink. The Arabs explained
that the Turks had thrown dead camels into the well to make the water
foul; but time had passed and the effect was wearing off. They filled
their water-skins; it was all the drink that they could hope for unless
they took Mudowwara. One of Zaal’s men slipped in by mistake and
when he struggled out again, leaving a black hole in the green scum,
the disturbed water stank horribly of old dead camel. At dusk Zaal,
Lawrence, the sergeants and one or two more crept forward quietly to
a Turkish trench-position on a ridge four or five hundred yards from
the station. It was deserted. The station lay below with its lighted
doors and windows, and its tent-camp. Zaal and Lawrence decided to
creep nearer. They went on until they could hear the soldiers talking
in the tents. A young, sickly-looking officer sauntered out towards
them; they could see his features in the light of a match with which
he lit a cigarette, and were ready to spring up and gag him; but he
happened to turn back. At the ridge they held a whispered council of
war. The garrison was perhaps two hundred men—Lawrence had counted the
tents—but the station buildings seemed too solid for the Stokes shells,
which were time-fused, not bursting on percussion; and the hundred and
sixteen Arabs, though they had the advantage of surprise, could not
yet be trusted to fight honourably together. So Lawrence voted against
the attack, which was put off until a better day. They went away then,
deciding at least to make sure of a train. Mudowwrara was not taken for
another eleven months.
Some miles south of the station they found an ideal place for
their mine and ambush. There was a low ridge of hills under cover of
which they could ride quite close to the railway, and where the ridge
ended was a curve such as Lawrence always chose for his mines because
of the difficulty of replacing curved rails. This curve was within
range of the ridge, which was fifty feet above the level of the rails;
and a raised embankment across a hollow seemed exactly the right spot
for the mine, for in the middle there was a two-arched bridge which
allowed for the passage of flood-water in the rainy season. Whatever
the effect of the mine might be on the engine, the bridge would
certainly go and the coaches behind would be derailed. From behind
the ridge, which was on the outside, not the inside of the curve,
Lewis could sweep the lines in either direction and Stokes could use
his trench-mortar unobserved. Lawrence was glad to have his two chief
responsibilities posted where they had a safe retreat, especially as
Stokes was weak with dysentery from the Mudowwara water, and Lewis
unwell too.
The camels were hobbled out of sight and Feisal’s negro freedmen, who
were in charge of the baggage-camels, carried their loads to the chosen
place—the two Stokes guns with their shells, the two Lewis guns, the
electric mine apparatus and the gelatine. Lawrence went to the bridge
to dig a bed between the ends of two steel sleepers in which to bury
his sandbag-full of gelatine, a fifty-pound shaking jelly. It took him
two hours to do this properly because he had to remove the ballast
which he had dug out, carrying it in a fold of his cloak, and dump it
where it would not show. Also he had been forced to cross a sandbank
and the tracks of his feet had to be covered. Then the two heavy wires,
each two hundred yards long, had to be unrolled, connected with the
charge and carried over the ridge where the exploder was to be put
under cover. The wires were stiff and would not lie flat unless weighed
down with stones, and it took three hours more to hide the marks made
in burying them. Lawrence finally finished off the job with a pair of
bellows and long brushings of his cloak to imitate a smooth wind-swept
surface. It was well done; nobody could see where the mine was, or
how the wires ran. The man who fired the exploder, however, being out
of sight of the bridge, had to be given the signal from a point fifty
yards ahead of him; so Lawrence decided to give the signal rather
than work the exploder himself. Feisal’s favourite freedman Salem was
given that honour and was taught on the disconnected exploder to bang
down the handle exactly as Lawrence raised his hand for an imaginary
engine on the bridge. Meanwhile the rest of the men, who had been left
with the camels, had got tired of the valley and were perched upon the
skyline with the sunset flaming behind them (the ambush was west of
the line), in full view of a small Turkish hill-post four miles to the
south and also of Mudowwara somewhat farther to the north. Lawrence and
Zaal threw them off the ridge, but it was too late; the Turks had seen
them and began to let off rifles at the lengthening shadows for fear of
a surprise attack. However, Lawrence hoped that the Turks might think
them gone if the place looked deserted in the morning; so they stayed
in the valley, baked bread and settled down comfortably for the night.
The party was now united and, ashamed of their folly on the skyline,
the jealous Howeitat tribesmen chose Zaal for their leader.
The next day, the nineteenth of September, Zaal and his cousin Howeimil
managed with difficulty to keep the fidgeting Arabs in the hollow,
but perhaps after all the Turks saw something, for at nine o’clock a
party of forty men came out from the southern post, advancing in
open order. If they were left alone they would discover the ambush
in an hour’s time; if they were opposed the railway would be alarmed
and traffic held up. The only thing to do was to send a small party
to snipe at them and, if possible, draw them away in pursuit behind
another ridge of hills out of sight. This would hide the main position
and reassure the Turks as to the size and intention of the force they
had seen. The trick worked well; they could hear by the shots gradually
sounding fainter in the distance that the Turks were being drawn off.
An ordinary patrol of eight men and a stout corporal then came up the
line from the south in search of mines or obstructions. Lawrence could
see the corporal mopping his forehead, for it was now eleven o’clock
and really hot. They walked over the mine without noticing anything,
but a mile or two farther on halted under a culvert, lay down, drank
from their water-bottles and at last went to sleep. It seemed that
the Turks were quite satisfied that the ridge was deserted, but about
noon Lawrence through his field-glasses saw a force of about a hundred
soldiers coming up towards them from Mudowwara, about six or seven
miles away. They were marching very slowly and no doubt unwillingly at
the thought of losing their accustomed midday sleep, but it could not
be more than two hours before they arrived. Lawrence decided to pack
up and move off, trusting to luck that the mine would not be noticed
and that he might come back later and try again. They sent a messenger
south to their drawing-off party to arrange a meeting-place behind some
rocks a mile or two away. But a minute later the watchman reported
smoke from the south. There was evidently a train in the next station
and, as they watched, it came puffing out towards them. A wild
scramble followed as the Arabs got into position behind the ridge.
Stokes and Lewis forgot their dysentery and raced to their guns.
The train rushed on at full speed and Lawrence saw that there were two
engines in front, not one, which rather upset his calculations: but he
decided to fire the mine under the second. If he mined the first, the
second might uncouple and steam away with the wagons. He was glad that
it was not an automatic mine. The Arabs with their rifles were only a
hundred and fifty yards from the bridge, and the Stokes and Lewis guns
three hundred; the exploder was in between, on the same ridge. On came
the train at full speed and opened random fire into the desert where
the Arabs had been reported. The firing sounded heavy and Lawrence
wondered if his eighty men were enough for the battle. There were ten
coaches with rifle-muzzles crowded at the windows and sandbag nests on
the roofs, filled with sharpshooters. The whistles screamed round the
curve, and Salem was dancing round the exploder on his knees, calling
on God to make him fruitful. As the front wheels touched the bridge
Lawrence raised his hand in the signal to Salem.
There was a terrific roar and the line vanished behind a column of
black dust and smoke a hundred feet high and wide, while fragments of
steel and iron struck clanging all about. An engine-wheel went whirling
over the ridge and fell heavily in the desert behind. There followed a
deathly silence. Lawrence ran to join the sergeants while Salem picked
up a rifle and charged into the smoke. As Lawrence ran he heard shots,
and the Bedouin could be seen leaping forward towards the track. The
train was stationary and the Turks were tumbling out of the doors
on the other side to shelter behind the railway embankment beyond.
Then the Lewis gun opened fire straight down the train, and the
long row of Turks on the roofs was swept off by the furious spray of
bullets. When Lawrence reached Stokes and Lewis, the Turks behind the
eleven-foot high embankment, in the middle of which the bridge had
been, were firing point-blank at the Arabs between the wheels of the
train. The Lewis gun could not reach them, protected by the train and
by the curve of the embankment, but the Stokes mortar could. Its second
shell dropped among them in the hollow and made a shambles of the
place. The survivors ran in a panic across the desert, throwing away
their rifles and equipment. This was the turn of Lewis again, who, with
his assistant, a Sherari boy, mowed down the Turks as they ran. That
ended the battle. The Sherari dropped the Lewis gun and rushed down
to join the others in the plundering. The whole affair had taken ten
minutes. Lawrence looked north and saw the hundred men from Mudowwara
breaking back uncertainly to the railway to meet the train-fugitives
running up the line. He looked south and saw the other thirty Arabs
racing each other to share in the spoil. The Turks with whom they had
been fighting, were coming slowly after them firing volleys. Evidently
the plunderers would be safe for half an hour more.
Lawrence ran down from the ridge to see what effect the mine had had.
The bridge was gone and into the gap had fallen the front wagon, which
had been filled with sick. The smash had killed all but three or four
and rolled dead and dying in a bleeding heap at one end. One of those
still alive called out the word ‘typhus’ in delirium. So Lawrence
wedged the door shut, and left them until their friends should come.
He was feeling pretty sick. The wagons following were derailed and
smashed; the frames of some were buckled beyond repair. The second
engine was a blanched pile of smoking iron. The first engine had come
off better; though it was derailed and lying half over with the cab
smashed, its driving gear was intact and the steam still at pressure.
The destruction of locomotives was the chief object of the campaign
against the railway, so Lawrence had kept a box of gun-cotton with fuse
and detonator ready for this very emergency. He put it on the cylinder,
lit the fuse and drove the plunderers back a little way. In half a
minute the charge burst, destroying the cylinder and the axle too. The
engine would not run again.
The Arabs had gone raving mad. They were running about at top speed,
bareheaded, half-naked, screaming, shooting in the air, clawing at
each other, as they burst open trucks and staggered off with immense
bales which they ripped open by the side of the railway, smashing what
they did not want. The train had been packed with refugees, sick men,
volunteers for boat-service on the Euphrates, and families of Turkish
officers returning to Damascus. To one side of the wreck stood thirty
or forty hysterical women, unveiled, tearing their clothes and hair,
shrieking together. The Arabs paid no attention to them, busy looting
their absolute fill for the first time in their lives. Never was such
a litter of household goods—carpets, mattresses, blankets, clothes
for men and women, clocks, cooking-pots, food, ornaments and weapons.
Camels became common property: each man loaded the nearest with what
it would carry and shooed it westward into the desert while he turned
to his next fancy. The women, seeing Lawrence unemployed, rushed and
caught at him, howling for mercy. He comforted them that there was no
danger, but they would not let him go until they were knocked away by
their husbands, who in turn grovelled at Lawrence’s feet in an
agony of terror, pleading for their lives. He kicked them off with
his bare feet and broke free. Next a group of Austrian officers and
non-commissioned officers, artillery instructors to the Turks, quietly
appealed to him in Turkish for quarter: he answered in German. Then one
of them, mortally wounded, asked in English for a doctor. There was
none, but Lawrence said that the Turks would soon be there to care for
him. The man was dead before that, and so were most of the others, for
a dispute broke out between them and the Arabs; an Austrian foolishly
fired at one of Lawrence’s Syrians, and before Lawrence could interfere
all but two or three were cut down.
Among the passengers were five Egyptian soldiers captured by the Turks
in a night-raid of Davenport’s two hundred miles down the line. They
knew Lawrence and told him of Davenport’s efforts in Abdulla’s sector
where he was constantly pegging away without much encouragement from
the Arabs and forced to rely mostly on imported Egyptians like these.
Lawrence set the five to march off the prisoners to the appointed
rallying-place behind the hills westward. Lewis and Stokes had come
down to help Lawrence, who was a little anxious about them. The Arabs
in their madness were as ready to attack friend as enemy. Three times
Lawrence had to defend himself when they pretended not to know him and
snatched at his things. Lewis went across the railway to count the
thirty men he had killed and to find Turkish gold and trophies in their
haversacks. Stokes went into the hollow behind the embankment, where
he saw the effect of his second shell and turned back hurriedly. One
of Lawrence’s Syrians came up with his arms full of booty and shouted
to Lawrence that an old woman in the last wagon but one wished to
see him. Lawrence told the man to put down the booty and go at once for
Ghazala and some baggage-camels to remove the guns; for the Turks were
coming close and the Arabs were escaping one by one towards the hills,
driving their staggering camels before them. Lawrence was annoyed with
himself for not having thought of moving the guns earlier. Meanwhile
he went to the last wagon but one, found a trembling old invalid, the
Lady Ayesha by name, a friend and hostess of Feisal’s, who wanted to
know what was happening. Lawrence reassured her that no harm would come
to her and found the old negress, her servant, whom he sent to bring a
drink from the leaking tender of the first engine. The grateful Lady
Ayesha later sent him secretly from Damascus a charming letter and a
little Baluchi carpet as a remembrance of their odd meeting. Later
still—as I hear from an indirect but trustworthy source—Lawrence, who
made it his principle to get no spoils of any sort from the War, sent
the carpet with an equally charming letter to Lady Allenby, who now has
it in her bedroom.
The Syrian never brought the camels. All of Lawrence’s servants,
overcome with greed, had escaped with the Bedouin. No one was now left
but the three Englishmen. They began to fear that they must abandon the
guns and run for their lives, but just then saw two camels cantering
back. It was Zaal and Howeimil, who had missed Lawrence and returned
to find him. Lawrence and the sergeants were rolling up the cable,
their only piece. Zaal dismounted and told Lawrence to climb up, but he
loaded the camel with the wire and exploder instead; Zaal laughed at
the quaint booty. Howeimil was lame from an old wound on the knee and
could not walk, but couched his camel while the Lewis guns were hoisted
across behind him, tied butt to butt and looking like scissors.
There remained the mortars, but Stokes appeared unskilfully leading a
stray baggage-camel which he had caught. Stokes was too weak to run, so
he was given Zaal’s camel with the mining apparatus; the trench-mortars
were put on the baggage-camel, and Howeimil went off in charge of them.
Meanwhile Lawrence, Lewis and Zaal, in a sheltered hollow behind the
old gun-position, made a fire of cartridge-boxes, petrol and wreckage,
banked the Lewis-gun drums and spare rifle ammunition round it, and
gingerly laid some Stokes shells on top. Then they ran. As the flames
reached the cordite and ammonal there was a colossal burst of fire,
thousands of cartridges exploded in series like machine-guns, and the
shells roared off in columns of dust and smoke. Both parties of Turks
were impressed by this noise, and decided that the Arabs were posted
strongly. They halted and began to send out flanking parties according
to rule. Through the gap between the main body of the northern party
and their flankers working round on the western side, the three men ran
panting away into concealment among the farther ridges.
At the rallying-place Lawrence found his missing camels and the Syrian
servants with them. In his soft deadly voice he told the Syrians what
he thought of them for their desertion. They pleaded that camels had
become common property and that someone else had gone off with the
right ones. But this did not excuse them for having found others
for themselves and loaded them up with plunder. Lawrence asked if
anyone was hurt and was told that a boy had been killed in the first
Arab rush; three others were slightly wounded. The rush had not been
ordered and was a mistake; the Lewis and Stokes guns could have managed
the killing without Arab help, and Lawrence felt that he was not
responsible for the boy’s death. Then one of Feisal’s freedmen
said that Salem was missing, and others that he had been last seen
lying wounded just beyond the engine. Lawrence had not been told and
was angry, for Salem was under his charge. For the second time he had
been put by Arab carelessness in the position of leaving a friend
behind. He called for volunteers to rescue the negro. Zaal and twelve
of his men said that they would try, but when they came near the train
they saw that they were too late. A hundred and fifty Turks were
swarming over the wreck and by now Salem would be dead, and not only
dead but tortured and mutilated as the Turkish habit was. (The Arabs
made a practice now of mercifully killing their own badly wounded to
prevent them falling alive into Turkish hands.)
They had to go back without Salem, but took the opportunity of
recovering some of the baggage, including the sergeants’ kits, which
had been left at the camping-ground. The Turks caught them at this
and opened fire with a machine-gun. Others ran to cut them off. Zaal,
a dead shot, stopped with five others at a ridge-top and fired back,
calling to the remainder of the party to escape while he held the Turks
up. So they retired from ridge to ridge, hitting at least thirteen or
fourteen Turks at the cost of four of their camels wounded. The Turks
gave up the pursuit.
Victory always undid an Arab force: this was now no longer a raiding
party but a stumbling baggage-caravan loaded to breaking-point with
enough household goods to make an Arab tribe rich for years. Of the
ninety prisoners, ten were friendly Arab women on the way to Damascus
from Medina who had now decided to go instead to Mecca by way of Akaba.
These and thirty-four wounded Turks were mounted in pairs on the
spare camels that had been used for carrying the explosives and
ammunition. The sergeants asked Lawrence to give them a sword each as
a souvenir; and he was going down the column to look for something for
them when suddenly he met Feisal’s freedmen and to his astonishment
saw, strapped on the crupper behind one of them, the missing Salem. He
was unconscious and soaked with blood from a wound through his back
near the spine. Apparently he had been hit in his rush downhill and
left for dead near the engine; where the tribesmen stripped him of his
cloak, dagger, rifle, and head-gear. One of his fellows had found him
alive and carried him off home without, as he should have done, telling
Lawrence. Salem soon recovered but ever afterwards bore Lawrence an
undeserved grudge for abandoning him when wounded and under his charge.