had drunk all their water—and its nearness to Mudowwara made this
dangerous. However, they made what haste they could and found it
unoccupied. So back safely to Rumm by the same long avenue; in the dark
this time, which made the cliffs more terrifying still, for they were
invisible except as a jagged skyline high overhead on either side.
From Rumm to Akaba, entering in glory laden with spoil, and boasting
that the trains were now at their mercy. The two sergeants hurriedly
returned to Egypt, having had the adventure they wanted. They had won
a battle single-handed, had dysentery, lived on camel-milk, learned to
ride a camel fifty miles a day without pain. They were awarded medals
by Allenby.
The success excited the camp at Akaba. Everybody wanted to try this
new and profitable sport of train-mining. The French captain of the
Algerian company of gunners at Akaba, by name Pisani, was the
first volunteer, an active and ambitious officer on the look-out for
decorations. Feisal provided three young noblemen of Damascus who were
eager to lead tribal raids, and on the twenty-sixth of September the
party rode to Rumm in search of tribesmen volunteers. Lawrence said
that the next raid was especially intended for Gasim’s clan. This was
heaping coals of fire on the adversary’s head, but the adversary was
too greedy to refuse the chance. The difficulty indeed was to keep down
the numbers. They took a hundred and fifty men and a huge train of
baggage-camels for the spoils.
This time they worked in the direction of Maan, riding over the Syrian
border into the high hills by Batra where the keen air of the northern
desert came blowing at them through a pass at the top. From Batra
they turned west and struck the railway, marching along it until they
came to a convenient bridge in an embankment, as at Mudowwara. Here,
between midnight and dawn, they buried an automatic mine of a new and
wonderful lyddite type. They lay in ambush a thousand yards away among
the wormwood thickets, but no train came that day or the following
night. Lawrence found the waiting intolerable. The Arabs paid no
attention to the leaders appointed by Feisal and would listen to no
one but Lawrence, whose success was now beginning to have results very
unwelcome to him. He was asked to act as judge and had to consent. With
Feisal’s example and his own pre-war experience at Carchemish to help
him out, he settled during that six days’ ride twelve cases of armed
assault, four camel-thefts, a marriage, two ordinary thefts, a divorce,
fourteen feuds, two cases of evil eye and a bewitchment.
The evil eyes he cured by staring at their possessors with his
own for ten minutes (‘horrible blue eyes,’ as an old Arab woman once
told him, ‘like bits of sky through the eye-holes of a skull’), the
bewitchment by casting a mock-spell of his own over the wizard. Then he
began to realize what he was doing—probably Pisani’s presence reminded
him that he was only an Englishman playing at being an Arab. He went
off on a long train of shameful thought about himself and the fraud
that he was playing on the Arabs. Again Pisani’s presence reminded him
that he was leading them into this war of freedom knowing well enough
that the chances were heavily against their being allowed to keep the
freedom if ever they won it. The agony of his mind’s conflict at Nebk
returned to him in double force. The stings of a scorpion on his left
hand kept him awake that night with an arm so swollen that at least he
was distracted by the pain from further thinking, but by next morning
his position began troubling him again, and he decided to renounce his
leadership. He called up the sheikhs to tell them of his decision.
But at that moment a train was reported, and as always happened with
Lawrence, who was another Hamlet, sudden enforced action cleared away
his philosophic doubts and hesitations. He jumped up to watch the
success of the mine.
However, the train with its cargo of water-tanks passed over without
accident. The Arabs, who wanted something better than water, thanked
him as if he had intended this failure. He had then to go down to
lay an electric mine over the other; the electric mine would set the
first one off. The Turks did not catch him at work, for it was their
hour of midday sleep. There were three bridges in the embankment and
the southern one had been chosen for the ambush. Under the arch of
the middle bridge Lawrence hid the exploder. The Lewis guns were
put under the northern one to rake the far side of the train when the
mine went off. On the near side was a convenient cross-channel in the
valley, three hundred yards from the railway, where the Arabs could
line up behind the wormwood bushes. No train came that day; enemy
patrols went constantly up and down the rails, but without finding the
mine. The next morning, the sixth of October, a train came out of Maan,
but ahead of the train a patrol was walking, and there was an anxious
wait to see which arrived first. If the patrol won the race it would
give warning to the train; however, Lawrence calculated that it would
be beaten by two or three hundred yards, so the Arabs took up their
position. The train came on panting up the gradient. It was a heavy
train with twelve loaded wagons.
Lawrence sat by a bush where he could see the mine, a hundred yards
away, and the exploder and the Lewis guns. He gave the signal when
the engine was exactly over the arch and the history of Mudowwara was
repeated. There was the same roar and cloud, but a green one this
time, because lyddite was being used instead of gelatine, and then the
Lewis gun rattled and the Arabs charged. Lawrence smiled sourly to see
Pisani running excitedly at their head singing the Marseillaise, as
if this was a battle for French freedom. A Turk on the buffers of the
fourth wagon from the end uncoupled the tail of the train and let it
slip downhill. Lawrence ran to stop it by putting a stone underneath
a wheel, but was amused at the trucks sliding off on their own to
safety; his effort was half-hearted. And he had reached a point of such
carelessness about his own safety that he only laughed at a Turkish
colonel in the runaway wagons who fired point-blank at him from a
window with his pistol. The Western military idea of trying to end
the War by reducing the enemy’s man-power seemed comic in the desert.
And the bullet only grazed his hip.
The train had been derailed, the engine ruined and the tender and front
wagon telescoped. Twenty Turks were killed, the others taken prisoners,
including four officers who stood in tears begging for their lives,
which, however, the Arabs never intended to take. The wagons contained
seventy tons of food-stuffs urgently needed down the line, as they
learned from the captured way-bill. For a joke Lawrence receipted this
and left it in the van, sending the duplicate to Feisal as detailed
report of the success. What could not be taken was destroyed under the
direction of Pisani. As before, the Arabs became merely camel-drivers,
walking behind a long string of loaded animals. This time Lawrence
was not deserted; Farraj held the camel, while Sheikh Salem (Gasim’s
brother) and another of the leading Arabs helped with the exploder and
the heavy wire. But rescue parties of the Turks were four hundred yards
away by the time they got off. There were no Arabs killed or wounded.
Lawrence’s pupils afterwards practised the art of mining by themselves
and rumours of their success spread through the tribes, not always
intelligently. The Beni Atiyeh tribe wrote to Feisal: ‘Send us a
_lurens_ and we will blow up trains with it.’ Feisal sent them one of
the Ageyl who helped them to ambush a most important train. On board
were the Turkish colonel who had left his garrison in the lurch at
Wejh, twenty thousand pounds in gold, and precious trophies. The Ageyl
repeated history by only saving the wire and exploder for his share.
During the next four months seventeen engines were destroyed and much
plunder taken. Travelling became a great terror for the Turks.
People paid extra for the back seats in trains. The engine-drivers went
on strike. Civilian traffic nearly ceased. The threat was extended to
Aleppo merely by having a notice posted in Damascus to say that all
good Arabs would henceforward travel on the Syrian railway at their own
risk. The Turks felt the loss severely; not only could they not any
longer think of marching out of Medina, but they were short of engines
in Palestine too, just when Allenby’s threat began to trouble them.
[Illustration:
description: Two photos wide shots of a toppled rail car over a
bridge and men working a railway
caption: DEMOLITIONS ON THE RAILWAY
_Copyright_
]
Meanwhile, in the middle of September, Allenby calling Lawrence to
Egypt asked him what exactly his aims were. Was this blowing up of
the railway more than a melodramatic advertisement for Feisal’s
cause? Lawrence explained his policy, unchanged since he framed it in
Abdulla’s camp six months before. He was hoping to keep the line to
Medina working, but only just working: the garrison was helpless to do
the Arabs harm and cost less to feed than it would in a prisoners’ camp
in Egypt if it surrendered. And while the mining was going on, the Arab
regulars were being properly trained for a move into Syria. Allenby
asked about the pass to Akaba north of Aba el Lissan where he knew from
spies that the Turks intended a big attack. Lawrence explained that
he and the Arabs had been working for months to provoke the Turks to
come forward, and at last were about to be rewarded. The Turks had been
hesitating because they had no idea of the strength of the Arabs, who
being mostly irregulars went about in parties, not in stiff formation;
so that neither aeroplanes nor spies could count them. On the other
hand, Lawrence and Feisal always knew exactly what the Turkish forces
were because they were regular troops and the Arab intelligence service
was excellent. So the Arabs could always decide in time whether to
fight or avoid fight.
Allenby understood then. And when at last the big attack was made from
Maan on Akaba by way of the northern pass, Maulud with his regulars let
the Turks into a trap from which few of them escaped. They never made
another attempt on Akaba.
XIX
In October, 1917, Allenby, who was fast reorganizing the British
Army on the borders of Palestine, had decided on an attack of the
Gaza-Beersheba line, to begin on the last day of the month. He had
resolved that this time the attempt must not fail as before for want
of artillery and troops, but since the Gaza end of the line (nearest
the sea) was very strongly entrenched—its very strength seemed to have
tempted the former disastrous British attacks—the scheme was to try
south at the Beersheba end. Elaborate care was taken to deceive the
Turks with false secret documents which they were allowed to capture,
into thinking that the Beersheba attack was a mere feint and that the
main attack was coming from Gaza.
It was for Lawrence to decide how much help the Arabs could afford
to give Allenby. He was in the unfortunate position of serving two
masters. And he did not ‘hate the one and love the other, cling to
the one and despise the other.’ He admired and had the confidence of
both, yet found himself unable to explain the whole Arab situation
to Allenby, or the whole British plan to Feisal. Allenby expected
much from Lawrence as one of his officers. But Feisal trusted him
implicitly and this trust made him perhaps more careful on the Arab
behalf than he might otherwise have been: and Feisal’s was the weaker
cause, always attractive to Lawrence. Now, the country immediately
behind the Turkish lines was peopled with tribes friendly to Feisal
and a sudden rising there might have an enormous effect on the War. If
Allenby was given a month’s fine weather to make possible the advance
of his cumbrous artillery and supplies he ought to be able to take not
only Jerusalem, which he was aiming at, but Haifa too. In that
case it would be a chance for the Arabs to strike from behind at the
all-important junction of Deraa, the nerve-centre of the Turkish army
in Palestine, where the Medina-Damascus railway joined the railway that
ran to Haifa and to Jerusalem. Near Deraa were great untouched reserves
of Arab fighting men, secretly taught and armed by Feisal from his base
at Akaba. Four main Bedouin tribes could be used there and, better
still, the peasants of the Hauran plain to the north, and the Druses, a
settled mountain folk from the east.
The attack on Beersheba had not yet begun, so Lawrence was in doubt
whether or not to call up all these helpers at once, to rush Deraa at
the same time as Allenby attacked Gaza and Beersheba, smash all the
railway lines, and even go on to surprise Damascus. He could count on
at least twelve thousand men, and success would put the Turks facing
Allenby into a desperate condition. He was greatly tempted to stake
everything on immediate action but could not quite make up his mind.
As a British officer he should have taken the risk, as a leader of the
Arab Revolt he should not have. The Arabs in Syria were imploring him
to come. Tallal, the great fighter who led the tribes about Deraa, sent
repeated messages that, given only a few of Feisal’s men in proof of
support, he could take Deraa. This would have been all very well for
Allenby, but Feisal could not decently accept Tallal’s offer unless
he was sure that Deraa could be held once it was taken. If anything
went wrong with the British advance and the Turks sent reinforcements
down from Aleppo and Damascus, Deraa would be recaptured and a general
massacre would follow of all the splendid peasantry of the district.
The Syrians could only rise once and when they did there must be
no mistake. The English troops were brave fighters, but Lawrence could
not yet trust Allenby, or rather the commanders under him who were,
he thought, quite capable of ruining a perfectly sound scheme, as at
the Suvla landing in the Dardanelles campaign, by not profiting from
their first sudden gains. And there was the weather. So he decided to
postpone the rising until the following year. It is difficult to say
now whether he was right. Allenby’s army fought excellently, but was
later held up by the rains.
He had to do something less than raising a general revolt, in return
for Allenby’s supplies and arms. So he decided that it would have to
be a big raid made by a Bedouin tribe without disturbing the settled
peoples, and something that would help Allenby in his pursuit of the
enemy. The best plan was to blow up one of the bridges crossing the
deep river-gorge of the Yarmuk just west of Deraa on the line leading
to Jerusalem. This would temporarily cut off the Turkish army in
Palestine from its base at Damascus, and make it less able to resist or
escape from Allenby’s advance. It would be a fortnight before either
of the two biggest bridges could be rebuilt. To reach the Yarmuk would
mean a ride of about four hundred and twenty miles from Akaba by way
of Azrak. The Turks thought the danger of an attempt on the bridges so
slight that they did not guard them at all strongly. So Lawrence put
the scheme before Allenby, who asked him to carry it out on November
the fifth or one of the three days following. If the attempt succeeded
and the weather held for the British advance, the chances were that
few of the Turkish army would get back to Damascus. The Arabs would
then have the opportunity of carrying on the wave of the attack
from a half-way point where the British, because of transport
difficulties, must stop exhausted. They should be able to sweep on to
Damascus.
In that case some important Arab was needed to lead the raid from
Azrak. Nasir, the usual pioneer who had led the Akaba expedition, was
away. But Ali ibn el Hussein was available, the young Harith chief
whom Lawrence had met disguised in his first ride to see Feisal a
year before, and who had lately been active in raids on the railway
down the line just above Davenport’s section. Ali knew Syria, for he
had been, with Feisal, the forced guest of the Turkish general Jemal
at Damascus. Besides, his courage, resource and energy were proved,
and no adventure had ever been too great or disaster too deep but Ali
had faced it with his high yell of a laugh. He was so strong that he
would kneel down, resting his forearms palm upwards on the ground,
and rise to his feet with a man standing on each hand. He could also
outstrip a trotting camel running with bare feet, keep his speed for a
quarter of a mile, and then leap into the saddle. He was headstrong and
conceited, reckless in word and deed, and the most admired fighter in
the Arab forces. Ali would win over the tribe of Beni Sakhr, who were
half-peasants, half-Bedouin, on the southern border of Syria. There
were good hopes also of securing the Serahin, the tribe about Azrak,
and there were others farther north on whom they might count for help.
Lawrence’s plan was to rush from Azrak to the Yarmuk village which
was the ancient Gadara; it commanded the most westerly of the two
most important bridges, a huge steel erection guarded by a force of
sixty men quartered in a railway station close by. No more than half
a dozen sentries were, however, stationed actually on the girders and
abutments of the bridge itself, as Lawrence had learned on his
previous ride to Damascus through this country. He hoped to take some
of Auda’s tough Abu Tayi Howeitat with him under Zaal. They would
make certain the actual storming of the bridge. To prevent enemy
reinforcements coming up, machine-guns would sweep the approaches to
the bridge; the men to handle these were a party of Mohammedan Indian
cavalrymen, now mounted on camels, under command of Jemadar Hassan
Shah, a firm and experienced man. They had been up-country from Wejh
for months, destroying rails, and might be assumed to be by now expert
camel-riders. The destruction of the great steel girders with only
small weights of explosive was a problem. Lawrence decided to fix
the charges in place with canvas strips and buckles and fire them
electrically. But this was a dangerous task under fire, so Wood, an
engineer officer at Akaba, came as a substitute in case Lawrence might
be hit. Wood had been condemned as unfit for active service on the
Western front after a bullet through the head.
[Illustration:
description: Portrait drawing waist up of a man in Arab dress
facing forward
caption: ALI IBN EL HUSSEIN
_from a drawing by_ ERIC KENNINGTON
]
They were making their last preparations when an unexpected ally
arrived, the chief Abd el Kader. He was an Algerian of a family that
had been living in Damascus since his grandfather, the defender of
Algiers against the French, had been deported from there thirty years
before. Abd el Kader, quarrelsome, deaf and boorish, was a religious
fanatic who, being recently sent by the Turks on secret political
business to Mecca, had paid a dutiful call instead on Sherif Hussein
and come away with a crimson banner and noble gifts, half-persuaded
of the right of the Arab cause. Now he offered Feisal the help of his
Algerian villagers, exiles like himself, living on the north bank of
the Yarmuk, half-way between the two important bridges but close
to others whose destruction might answer nearly as well. This seemed
excellent. As the Algerians did not mix with their Arab neighbours, the
destruction of the bridge or bridges could be arranged quietly without
exciting the whole peasant countryside into revolt.
Suddenly a telegram came from the French Colonel to say that Abd el
Kader was a spy in Turkish pay. This was disconcerting, but there
was no proof, and the Colonel was not greatly liked himself since
his letter to Abdulla about the English and his earlier intrigues at
Jiddah. Probably he was annoyed at Abd el Kader’s private and public
denunciations of the French. So Feisal asked Abd el Kader to ride with
Lawrence and Ali ibn el Hussein, telling Lawrence privately: ‘I know he
is mad, I think he is honest. Guard your heads and use him.’ He joined
the party. Whether or not he was a spy, he was a great annoyance to the
party: being a religious fanatic he resented Lawrence’s undisguised
Christianity, and being ridiculously vain, resented being sent along
with Ali whom the tribes treated as greater, and with Lawrence whom
they treated as better than himself. Also his deafness was most
inconvenient.
For his body-guard Lawrence took six Syrian recruits, chosen largely
for their knowledge of the various districts through which he had to
pass, with two Biasha tribesmen and the inseparable Farraj and Daud.
These two were busy as usual at practical jokes and on the morning
of October the twenty-fourth, the day of departure from Akaba, they
completely disappeared. At noon came a message from fat Sheikh Yusuf,
the Governor, to say that they were in prison and would Lawrence come
and talk about it? Lawrence found Yusuf shaking between laughter and
rage. His new cream-coloured riding-camel had strayed into the
palm-garden where Lawrence’s Ageyl were encamped. Farraj and Daud, not
suspecting that the camel was the Governor’s, had painted its body
bright-red with henna and its legs blue with indigo before turning
it loose. The camel caused an uproar in Akaba and when Yusuf with
difficulty recognized the circus-like animal as his own, he hurried out
his police to find the criminals. Farraj and Daud were found stained to
their elbows with dye and though swearing innocence were soundly beaten
and sent to prison in irons for a week. Lawrence arranged their release
by lending the Governor a camel of his own until the dye had worn off
the other, and promising that the Governor should beat the boys again
after the expedition. So they joined the caravan singing, though they
had to walk mile after mile because of a new kind of saddle-soreness
which they called ‘Yusufitis.’
The expedition went by way of Rumm, crossing the railway line near
Shedia, but it was not a compact or happy family. Abd el Kader was
continually quarrelling with Ali ibn el Hussein, who prayed God to
deliver him from the man’s bad manners, deafness, conceit. Wood
was ill and the Indians, who proved to be very bad at loading and
leading the baggage-camels, had to be helped with them by Lawrence’s
body-guard, and lagged far behind: Lawrence was not much troubled by
these difficulties, because on the first stage of the journey he had
for companion Lloyd (now British High Commissioner in Egypt), who had
originally come out with him from England. It was a great thing to have
someone European-minded and well-read to talk to again after months
with the Arabs. Lawrence’s Bedouin self wore off as he rode ahead with
Lloyd, so engrossed in talk that they nearly lost touch with
the Indians behind and, losing direction too, nearly ran into Shedia
station. They turned in time and crossed the railway line in safety
between two block-houses; contenting themselves merely with cutting the
telegraph-wires. Ali and Abd el Kader were crossing the line farther
north and soon came a rattle of machine-gun and rifle-fire: evidently
they had not been lucky in their crossing. It turned out later that
they had two men killed.