spite against the Turks and to parody the usual farce of a regular
battle, he had caused a wanton and useless massacre. And, worse, he
had carelessly thrown away the lives of many of his Arab friends. It
would have been quite possible to have refused battle, even without
yielding the village, and by manœuvring about to have drawn the Turks
into a trap from which they would have escaped with some loss and great
irritation. But this was ghastly. The Turkish survivors were pouring
down a steep defile back towards Kerak, with the whole force of Arabs
in pursuit. It was too late now for Lawrence to run after and call
the Arabs off, and he was too tired to try. In the end, only fifty
exhausted Turks of the whole brigade got safely back. For though the
Arab army did not pursue the broken enemy for more than a mile or two,
the peasants farther along the Kerak road shot them down one by one as
they ran.
The Arabs had captured the two mountain howitzers (very useful to
them afterwards), the twenty-seven machine-guns, two hundred horses
and mules, two hundred and fifty prisoners. But twenty or thirty dead
Arabs were carried back across the cliff to Tafileh and the sight
filled Lawrence with shame. Then it began to snow and the wind blew
to a blizzard. Only very late and with great difficulty they got in
their own wounded; the Turkish wounded had to lie out and were all
dead the next day. The blizzard continued and Lawrence was unable to
follow up his success. He amused himself by writing a report of
the battle, in his boyish handwriting, to the British Army Headquarters
in Palestine. It was a parody, like the battle itself, and full of
all the usual military catchwords used in official despatches. It was
taken quite seriously. Lawrence was thought to be a brilliant young
amateur doing his best to imitate the great models and the bad joke was
turned against him by the offer of another military decoration, the
Distinguished Service Order this time.
He partly regained his self-respect three days later by a far more
important piece of work, which was the stopping of the transport of
food up the Dead Sea, which Allenby had asked him to undertake. He
had arranged with a chief of the Beersheba Bedouin, encamped near by,
to raid the Turkish ships that were at anchor in a little port below
Kerak at the south-east end of the Dead Sea. This was one of the two
occasions in British military history when mounted men have fought and
sunk a fleet. The Bedouin, in a sudden charge at dawn, surprised the
sailors asleep on the beach, then scuttled the launches and lighters in
deep water and looted the port. They took sixty prisoners, burned the
storehouse, and came away without any loss to themselves.
Lawrence in making his report ironically countered the award of the
military D.S.O. by recommending himself for a naval D.S.O., which
has a different coloured ribbon. But this time Headquarters saw
the joke; which he hammered away at later in a further ridiculous
self-recommendation.
At Tafileh it was colder than ever and though there was food enough
Lawrence could not stand the squalor of crowding with his twenty-seven
men in two tiny rooms. It was the fleas and the painful smoke of
green wood on the open fire, and the dripping mud roof. And his
men’s tempers. One of the Syrians who had given trouble before
on the ride to the Yarmuk bridge had a dagger fight with Mahmas, a
camel-driver. In Europe, Mahmas would have been called a homicidal
maniac, so possibly it was not the guardsman’s fault. If Mahmas was
worsted in argument or laughed at, or even for a mere fancy, he would
lean forward with his little dagger and rip the other man up. Three
men at least he had killed so; once Lawrence had the unpleasant task
of disarming him when he was running amok. After the War when Eric
Kennington, who has edited the illustrations of this book, was in
Transjordania drawing portraits of Arabs, one of the men he chose out,
without knowing his history, was Mahmas. As he was working on the
portrait he noticed the whites of Mahmas’s eyes turning up queerly
and his face going insane; and suddenly he was on Kennington with his
dagger raised. Kennington pretended to pay no attention but stooped
carelessly to pick up a piece of chalk. This saved his life. The
madness died and Mahmas was as friendly as he had been before the
attack. Kennington sketched in the dagger as a comment on the occasion.
[Illustration:
description: Portrait drawing of a seated man in Arab dress
facing forward with right hand holding a dagger
caption: MAHMAS
_from a drawing by_ ERIC KENNINGTON
]
For his fight—quarrelling in the guard was an unforgivable
offence—Mahmas was heavily whipped by El Zaagi, his captain, so was
the other contestant. Lawrence, in the next room, could not endure
the noise of the blows after his Deraa experience and stopped El
Zaagi before he had gone very far. Mahmas was weeping before the
punishment started and when it was over was in disgrace as a coward.
To the Syrian, who had endured without complaint, Lawrence gave an
embroidered silk headcloth next morning for his faithful services; but
did not tell the man the real reason of the gift. After this, Lawrence
decided to scatter his body-guard among the other houses. The men were
too high-spirited to be shut up together in two small rooms with
nothing to do. He went off himself on a journey to get the gold that
Zeid would need, when the fine weather came, for enrolling the new
tribesmen through whose territory the Arabs were to advance.
On the fourth of February, 1918, Lawrence started towards Akaba with
five men, on camels, across the hills; a most painful ride in bitter
cold and whirling snow. At a night halt in the shelter of the rock the
four men with him, lying on the frozen ground beside their camels,
resigned themselves to death. They would not speak or move when he
called to them and he could only rouse them by pulling one of them up
by the love-locks, which startled him painfully to life, and the others
then woke up too. From Feisal in Akaba he got thirty thousand pounds
in gold, two attendants of the Ateiba tribe and a party of twenty men
under a sheikh to carry the gold. The gold was in £1,000 bags, each
bag weighing about twenty-two pounds. Two were enough weight for each
camel, swung on either side of the saddle. They had hardly started
before the sheikh stopped for hospitality at the tent of a friend and
said that perhaps he and his men might come on with Lawrence the next
day, if the weather improved. Lawrence knew what delay this would mean
and decided that the best way to get the party moving for sure the
next day was to ride on ahead and shame them into following. So he
went forward with his own attendants. The wind blew so bitter, that
the men, who, being from Central Arabia, had never experienced cold
like this before and now saw snow for the first time in their lives,
thought from the pains in their lungs that they were strangling. The
party rode behind the hill where old Maulud and his regulars were
besieging the Turks at Maan: for Lawrence wanted to spare his men
the unhappiness of passing a friendly camp without a halt.
Maulud’s men had been here for two solid months in dugouts on the
side of the hill. Their only fuel was wet wormwood, on which they
with difficulty baked bread every other day. They had no clothes but
khaki drill uniform; and when Feisal’s supply officer had applied on
their behalf to Egypt for ordinary khaki serge the answer had been
that Arabia was a tropical country and that therefore only tropical
kit could be issued. Nor could he get them sufficient army boots. (The
regulars got boots, most of them. The irregulars did not, though their
need was as great.) They slept in wet verminous pits on empty flour
sacks, six or eight huddled together in a bunch to make their few
blankets go as far as possible. More than half of them died or were
broken in health by the cold and wet. But Maulud, by his great heart,
somehow kept the survivors in their places, daily exchanging shots with
the Turks. Their camp was four thousand feet above sea-level.
Lawrence’s journey grew worse, with frequent falls and a wind so
violent that they could do no more than a mile an hour against it.
They had frequently to dismount and pull the camels up mud-banks
and through icy streams. After many hours the men flung themselves,
weeping, on the ground and refused to go farther, so they camped there
for the night in the slush between their camels. The next day, coming
on a Howeitat camp, the two Ateiba tribesmen refused to go farther
with Lawrence. They said that it would be death. Lawrence called them
cowards and swore that he would go the rest of the journey alone with
their four bags of gold, in addition to his own two. He had a very fine
cream-coloured camel, by name Wodheiha, who saved his life that
day: she refused to take a short cut over some frozen mud-flats, but,
when he fell through the cat-ice and got bogged to the waist, came
close so that he could pull himself out by grabbing at her fetlock. He
did ten miles that afternoon, travelling all the time, and stopping the
night at an old Crusaders’ castle where a friendly chief was encamped.
The old man was hospitable but mentioned, as he blessed the meal, that
the next day his two hundred men must starve or rob, for they had
neither food nor money and his messengers to Feisal were held up by
the snow. Lawrence immediately gave him five hundred pounds on account
until his subsidy came.
In the morning he rode out again on the last stage of his journey to
Tafileh. With him came two men from the castle as escort, but they soon
deserted him and he went on alone. That afternoon, climbing uphill
through snowdrifts that completely hid the path, Wodheiha grew very
tired, missed her footing and slipped eighteen feet, with Lawrence,
down the steep hill-side into a frozen snowdrift. After the fall she
rose trembling and stood still. He was afraid that she had come to the
end of her strength and vainly tried to tow her out, up to his neck in
snow. Then he hit her from behind but could not budge her. He mounted
her and she sat down. He jumped off and heaved her up, wondering if the
drift was too deep for her. With his bare hands and feet he scooped
her a road. The crust was sharp and cut his wrists and bare ankles
till they bled over the snow, but he carried the little road back to
the path, mounted Wodheiha again and rushed her successfully up the
hill-side. They went on cautiously, Lawrence sounding the path with
his stick or digging new roads through the deeper drifts. In three
hours they were on the mountain-ridge overlooking the valley of
the Dead Sea. Thousands of feet below he could see village-gardens
green and happy in their summer-like weather. Towards evening Wodheiha
balked at a snow-bank and he was afraid that she would not manage it
this time and would have to be left there to die. So he led her back a
hundred yards and charged her over at a canter. The other side of the
bank was slippery, having been exposed to the sun all the afternoon.
Wodheiha lost her footing and went slithering down on her tail, with
locked legs, for about a hundred feet; Lawrence still in the saddle.
There were stones under the snow and she sprang up in rage, lashing
her tail, then ran forward at ten miles an hour, sliding and plunging
down the path towards the nearest mountain-village. Lawrence was
clinging to the saddle, in terror of broken bones. Some men of Zeid’s
were weather-bound at this village, and came out much amused at the
distinguished entry. Lawrence made the last eight miles to Tafileh in
safety, gave Zeid some money and his letters and went gladly to bed.
He went forward the next day to plan out the Arab advance to Kerak and
so along the eastern side of the Dead Sea. The weather was improving
and he was reassured that the steps of the advance would be easy.
Jericho was still in Turkish hands, but would soon fall, and it would
be as well to go forward at once to threaten the Turkish left flank
on the eastern bank of the Jordan. He came back and told Zeid of his
plans. But the Tafileh district had seen too many changes in the
fortune of the Arab Revolt to decide on any more risks on its behalf.
Zeid had to confess that to arrange a further advance was beyond his
powers.
This was a facer for Lawrence, who had promised Allenby to fulfil a
certain programme by certain dates and had drawn special credits
for the operation. His scheme was now breaking down, not for military
reasons, but because of a defect in propaganda, for the purpose of
which Lawrence was attached to Feisal’s headquarters. It therefore
reflected personally upon him.
There was nothing for Lawrence to do but go at once to Allenby at
his Headquarters at Beersheba, confess to failure and resign. He
started late the same afternoon with four men, cutting straight across
country, first down five thousand feet from the Tafileh hills and then
up three thousand feet into Palestine. At Beersheba he met his old
friend, Hogarth, and explained the whole business to him. That his
breakdown should have been with Zeid, a little man whom he liked, put
a finishing touch to his general feeling of exhaustion. Lawrence went
on to complain that never since he landed in Arabia had he been given
an order, never anything more than requests and options. He was tired
to death of free-will and responsibility, all he wanted now was to
resign and be given a job in which he was not compelled to think or act
for himself; any routine job would do. Also he had for the last year
and a half ridden something like a thousand miles a month on camels,
not to mention thousands of miles more in crazy aeroplanes and jolting
cars. In each of his last five fights he had been wounded and he now so
dreaded further pain that he had to force himself to go under fire. He
had generally been hungry, and lately always cold. Frost and dirt had
poisoned his wounds to a mass of festering sores. And the guilt of the
fraud on the Arabs and of the deed of Tafileh was heavy on his mind.
However, it was not to be. Hogarth took him to the head of the Arab
Bureau, who refused to let him resign. The Imperial War Cabinet was
counting on Allenby to end the deadlock in the West by winning the
war in the East. If Allenby could take Damascus and possibly Aleppo,
Turkey would be forced to surrender and that might encourage Austria
and Bulgaria to follow suit; the Germans could not then hold out
longer. But Allenby could not win his war without a protected right
flank and Lawrence was the only man with enough control of the Arabs to
give him this. The matter of a few paltry thousand pounds was not going
to stand in the way of victory. So he was actually ordered this time to
take up the task, and quietly accepted the inevitable.
Allenby wanted to know whether Lawrence could still link up with him at
Jericho, which had just been taken, and so continue the advance north
to Amman. Lawrence said that he could not manage at present without a
great deal of help. The first trouble was Maan, which was holding up
the Arab Army. Maan must be taken and, now that the time had come, the
pilgrims’ railway must be permanently cut. The Arab Army could do it
but would want seven hundred baggage camels for transport, also money,
more guns, more machine-guns and protection from a counter-attack from
Amman. Allenby promised all this, and Lawrence promised in return that
when Maan fell the Arab Army would move up to Jericho and join in
Allenby’s great advance on Damascus from the Mediterranean Coast to the
Dead Sea.
He went to Feisal at Akaba and explained that the Arabs would now soon
be driven out of Tafileh by the Turks, but that Tafileh did not matter.
Amman and Maan were the only important points from now on and a Turkish
force in Tafileh would actually waste the Turkish strength. Feisal,
anxious for Arab honour, sent a warning message to Zeid, but without
avail; for six days later the Turks drove him out of the place.
XXIII
Spring had come and the war was starting again in earnest. The Arab
army was now very well provided with transport and everything else it
wanted except enough guns; it had a special branch of Allenby’s staff
to look after its interests, under Colonel Dawnay. He was the only
British officer, Lawrence writes, who ever learned to understand the
difference between national revolt, with the irregular fighting it
entailed, and modern warfare between large regular armies, and to keep
the two going together without confusion.
The plan that was worked out for the taking of Maan was for the
armoured cars to go to Mudowwara and permanently cut the railway there
while the Arab regulars seized the railway, a day’s march north of
Maan, and compelled the Turkish garrison to come out to fight if they
would not starve. The Arab regulars were now easily a match for the
Turks and would have the help of irregulars on their flanks. Feisal and
Jaafar liked the plan but, unfortunately, the other officers wanted
to make a direct assault on the town and old Maulud wrote to Feisal
protesting against British interference with Arab liberty. Then, though
the supplies, arms, pay and transport were all now being supplied by
the British, Lawrence and Dawnay saw that it would be wise to give the
Arabs their way even if it was a foolish way. The Arabs were volunteers
in a far truer sense than the British Army, in which enlistment
by every able-bodied man had now for some months, though ‘deemed
voluntary,’ been in fact compulsory; (for, as Lord Carson said with
perhaps unconscious humour, ‘the necessary supply of heroes must be
maintained at all costs’). Arab service was literally voluntary,
for any man was at perfect liberty to return home whenever he liked.
A large number of the Arab irregulars were going to Atara, seventy
miles due north of Bair, there to wait for news of Allenby’s attack
on Amman, fifty miles to the north-west. Lawrence went, too, with his
body-guard. On the fourth of April the army started with its train of
two thousand baggage camels and reached Atara four days later without
loss. At the crossing of the railway, Lawrence happened to be ahead
of his body-guard. It was near sunset and everything seemed peaceful
enough; but as he rode up the embankment the camel’s feet scrambled in
the loose ballast and out of the long shadow of a culvert on the left,
where no doubt he had slept all day, rose a Turkish soldier. He looked
wildly at Lawrence, who had a pistol in his hand, and then with sadness
at his own rifle yards away out of reach. Lawrence stared at him and
said softly, ‘God is merciful.’ The Turk knew the sense of the Arabic
phrase and a look of incredulous joy came over his fat, sleepy face.
However, he made no answer. Lawrence pressed the camel’s shoulder with
his foot; she went carefully over the metals and down the bank on the
other side. The Turk had enough good feeling not to shoot him in the
back, and he rode away with the warmth of heart that a man always has
towards a life he has saved. When, at a safe distance, he looked back,
the Turk had his thumb to his nose and was twinkling his fingers in
farewell.
At Atara everything was green and fresh with spring, and the camels
were enjoying themselves greatly. News came that Amman was taken;
the Arabs were making an immediate move farther north to join them,
but further reports said that the British had been driven out again
with heavy losses. Lawrence, who had lately impressed on the Arabs
that the British never failed in their attacks, refused to believe the
story, but it was true. Major Buxton’s battalion of English camel-corps
had taken the town, but the Australian cavalry, who were to have
attacked on his right, had their animals so wearied after the fighting
at the Jordan-crossing and a long march over the central mountain
range, that they were forced to leave Buxton to carry on the battle on
his own. He was driven out with a loss of over half his force and a
second attack the next day had to be called off; other British troops
that came up to help him had, as one of their officers has informed me,
been drinking too much ration-rum on empty stomachs.
This meant no advance for the Arabs. They turned south. But first
Lawrence went spying into Amman in company with three gipsy women and
Farraj disguised, like himself, as one of them. He had a good look
round and decided that the place should be left alone as too strong
for Arab attack. As they were returning some Turkish soldiers stopped
them and made love to them; they only escaped by running away at top
speed. Lawrence decided in future to use British khaki uniform again
as the best disguise because too brazen to be suspected. Farraj was a
changed person. Daud had died of the cold and wet that terrible winter,
and Farraj went about heavy-eyed and restless, alone. He took greater
care than ever of Lawrence’s camel, saddles and clothes, and of the
coffee-making, but never made another joke and began praying regularly
three times a day. A week after this Amman visit he was himself
dead, being mortally wounded in a mounted raid against a Turkish
railway-patrol.
They then rode down towards Maan to see how the attack there was
getting on. The Arabs had done well; under Jaafar they had cut the
line north of Maan, destroying a station and three thousand rails; and
south of Maan Nuri Said had accounted for another station and five
thousand rails. They were making an attack now on Maan itself. Lawrence
came upon old Maulud badly wounded, his thigh-bone splintered above
the knee; but he called to Lawrence in a weak voice from the litter,
‘Thanks be to God, it is nothing. We have taken Semna.’ ‘I am going
there,’ said Lawrence. Semna was the crescent-shaped hill overlooking
Maan from the west, and Maulud, though hardly able to see or speak
for exhaustion, craned over the side of the litter to point backwards
to the hill and explain the best way of defending the place against
counter-attack. Two days later, when Auda’s Abu Tayi had taken two
Turkish posts on the farther side of the station and Jaafar, now in
command, had massed his guns on the south, Nuri Said led an attack on
the railway station. They captured it, but unfortunately the ammunition
of the artillery covering their advance gave out and the station was
retaken. This was disappointing, but the Arab troops had behaved so
well under machine-gun fire and made such good use of ground, that it
was clear that they could be used safely in future without a stiffening
of British troops. This discovery was something to set off against
defeat.
The next move was against the eighty miles of railway north of
Mudowwara. Colonel Dawnay was in charge of the attack which was to be
made by the armoured cars, with aeroplanes to drop bombs and Egyptians
and Arab tribesmen to do the hand-to-hand fighting. He issued formal
typewritten operation-orders with map references and an accurate
programme of times and objectives. This rather amused Lawrence, whose
fighting hitherto had all been of the careless verbal sort, (‘Let’s
attack that place over there; you go round this way and I’ll go round
the other, and afterwards we’ll blow something up if we can’), and
who did not regard the present operations as on a big enough scale to
justify the use of the typewriter.