look after the tribesmen and the Egyptians. He knew that one
misunderstanding would spoil the delicate balance of the Arab Front and
that such misunderstandings would be bound to occur unless somebody
responsible was continually on the watch. As he was himself about the
only man intimate enough with the Arabs to be ceaselessly with them
without boring them into sulks, he tried to god-father every mixed
expedition. The programme worked out exactly except that the Turks
at the post north of the first station to be attacked surrendered
ten minutes too soon and that the Arab tribesmen who took the south
post did not advance in alternate rushes with covering fire, as they
were expected, but made a camel-charge, steeplechasing across the
Turkish breastworks and trenches. Then the station itself surrendered
and the Arabs enjoyed the maddest looting of their history. Lawrence
himself broke his no-looting rule by taking off the brass station-bell
(which, after the War, I once heard him ring out of his window in
the quadrangle of All Souls College at Oxford, to wake up someone
he wanted in the place). He was called in to settle a dangerous
dispute about loot between the Arabs and the Egyptians. However, this
was arranged, for nearly all the Arabs were, for once, completely
satisfied with what they had got. They moved off home; only a few
faithful ones were left behind for the attack on the next station.
These few were rewarded. There was no fighting—the Turks had run
away—and plenty of loot; so they praised themselves loudly for their
loyalty. Mudowwara itself was the next objective, but there was a
troop-train in the station and the Turks opened on the armoured cars
with accurate gun-fire at four miles’ range, so the attack was not
pressed. Meanwhile, Lawrence and Hornby in Rolls-Royces were running
up and down the line, blowing up bridges and rails. They used two tons
of gun-cotton. Lawrence visited the place south of Mudowwara where he
had mined his first train, and destroyed the long bridge under which
the Turkish patrol had slept on that adventurous day in the previous
September.
Mohammed el Dheilan (the victim of Auda’s pearl-necklace story) and
the Abu Tayi tribesmen then took five more stations between Maan and
Mudowwara and so eighty miles of line were cut beyond repair. That
settled the fate of Medina, four hundred miles to the south.
Early in May Lawrence went up to Palestine to discuss the future with
Allenby, leaving the Arabs and English to make another eighty-mile
break north of Maan. On arrival he found to his disgust that Allenby’s
chief of staff had decided on a raid against Salt, with the help of
Beni Sakhr tribesmen. This was trespassing on Lawrence’s ground, and
clumsy trespassing. He asked who was to lead the Arab forces and
was told: ‘Fahad, at the head of twenty thousand tribesmen.’ It was
ridiculous. Fahad was never able to raise more than four hundred of
his own clan and, in any case, he had now moved south to help the new
operations just above Maan. Some of his greedy relations must have
ridden over to Jerusalem to screw money out of the English by
giving these impossible promises. Of course no Beni Sakhr appeared and
the raid miscarried with heavy losses; the survivors only just escaped
being cut off and captured.
The Arabs now found that there were disadvantages as well as advantages
in being tied to the English. Allenby could not make his intended great
attack because the Germans had begun their last big offensive and his
best troops were being taken from him and hurried to France to save a
break-through. The Arabs had to wait, too, until new troops reached
Allenby from India and his army was reorganized—a delay of perhaps four
or five months. Meanwhile Allenby was lucky if he could hang on to his
Jerusalem-Jaffa line. He told Lawrence so on May the fifth, the very
day chosen for the great joint advance north. It was bad news for the
Arabs besieging Maan with forces only half the size of the garrison.
Maan was well supplied with stores and ammunition—the Turks had sent
down a supply column of pack animals—and now that the pressure from the
English was relaxed, big forces of Turks would probably come down from
Amman, raise the siege and push the Arabs out of Aba el Lissan.
However, Allenby said that he would do his very best for Lawrence in
helping the Arab army in every way but with men. He promised repeated
aeroplane raids on the railway and these turned out most useful in
hindering the Turks in their advance. As Allenby was giving Lawrence
tea that day, he happened to remark that he was sorry that he had been
forced to abolish the Imperial Camel Brigade, which was in Sinai, but
men were short and he had to use them as cavalry up at Jerusalem.
Lawrence asked what was going to be done with the camels. Allenby
told him to ask the Quartermaster-General. So Lawrence left the
tea-table and went to the Quartermaster-General’s office with the
question. The Quartermaster-General, who was very Scotch, answered
firmly that the camels were needed as transport for one of the new
divisions which were on their way from India. Lawrence explained that
he wanted two thousand of them. The Quartermaster-General answered
briefly that he might go on wanting. So Lawrence went back and said
aloud at the tea-table that there were for disposal two thousand two
hundred riding camels and thirteen hundred baggage camels. All, he
said, were earmarked for transport, but of course _riding camels were
riding camels!_ The staff whistled and looked wise, as if they doubted
whether riding camels could carry baggage. Lawrence had known that
a technicality might be useful, even a sham one, for every British
officer had to pretend that he understood animals, as a point of
honour. So he was not surprised that night at dinner to find himself on
one side of Allenby, with the Quartermaster-General on the other.
With the soup, Allenby began to talk of camels, and the
Quartermaster-General immediately said how lucky it was that the
Indian Division’s transport would now be brought up to strength by
the disbanding of the Camel Brigade. It was a bad move; Allenby cared
nothing for strengths. He turned to Lawrence and said with a twinkle:
‘And what do you want them for?’ Lawrence answered hotly: ‘To put
a thousand men into Deraa any day you please.’ Now Deraa junction
(the secret of whose weakness against surprise Lawrence had bought
at great cost to himself) was the nerve-centre of the Turkish army.
Its destruction would cut off, from Damascus and Aleppo, both the
line south to Amman and Maan and the line east to Haifa and Northern
Palestine. So Allenby turned to the Quartermaster-General again
and smilingly said: ‘Q, you lose.’
It was a princely gift, for now the Arab army could move about freely
far from its base and could win its war when and where it pleased.
Lawrence hurried back to Feisal, who was at Aba el Lissan, and teased
him by first talking at length about histories, tribes, migrations, the
spring rains, pasture, and so on. At last casually he mentioned the
gift of two thousand camels. Feisal gasped with delight and sent his
slave running for Auda, Zaal, Fahad, and the rest of his chiefs. They
came in anxiously asking: ‘Please God, is it good?’ He answered with
shining eyes: ‘Praise God!’ The chiefs heard the news with astonishment
and looked at Lawrence, who said: ‘The bounty of Allenby.’ Zaal spoke
for them all: ‘God keep his life and yours.’ Lawrence replied: ‘We have
been made victorious.’ The chiefs were as delighted as Feisal.
But before the camels could be used against Deraa the nearer danger
must be settled. There was a big Turkish force gathering at Amman for
the relief of Maan. Nasir was asked to delay it by another big breach
of the railway at Hesa, half-way between the two towns. He succeeded by
the old method of blowing up bridges north and south, the night before,
and at dawn bombarding the station, with a camel-charge to follow. As
usual, there were no losses at all. Hornby and others with explosives
then hurriedly demolished fourteen miles of railway.
This was excellent: the Turks would be delayed at least a month and it
would be the end of August before they could patch up the railway just
north of Maan and be ready to attack Aba el Lissan. By that time, for
it was now early June, Allenby would be nearly ready to advance again
and the Turks might not dare to make the attempt. The Arab forces
could then be divided into three main parties: a thousand camel-men
to take Deraa, and two or three thousand infantry to join up with
Allenby at Jericho, the remainder to continue to keep watch above Maan.
Lawrence decided to get Sherif Hussein, as nominal commander-in-chief
of the Arab armies, to send Feisal all the regular troops besieging
Medina under his brothers, Abdulla and Ali. Medina was in a pitiful
state now, with short rations and scurvy, cut off from Damascus by the
railway-breach between Maan and Mudowwara, and needed no more harrying;
while the Arab troops were urgently needed for the advance north. But
the old man was jealous of Feisal’s success and made difficulties.
Lawrence went down to Jiddah to talk him over, bringing letters from
Feisal, Allenby and the High Commissioner of Egypt, the Sherifs
paymaster. But the Sherif, pleading the fast of Ramadan, retired to
Mecca, a holy place where Lawrence could not follow him. The Sherif
consented to talk over the telephone, but sheltered himself behind
the incompetence of the Mecca exchange whenever he did not like the
conversation. Lawrence, in no mood for farce, rang off and came away.
Allenby was going to begin his attack on September the nineteenth
and, to make sure that the Turks did not begin their move on Aba el
Lissan before it started, something new was needed. Dawnay was then
inspired to remember the surviving battalion of the Imperial Camel
Corps, the one that had been in the Amman raid, three hundred men under
their capable officer, Major Buxton. Allenby’s chief-of-staff agreed
to lend this battalion to the Arabs for a month, on two conditions:
the first that a scheme of operations should be provided, the
second—a quaint one—that there should be no casualties. The actual
operation-orders made out by Dawnay and Lawrence are, as a matter of
interest, to be found in an appendix at the end of this book.
Buxton’s march was to be the diversion; three weeks later the real blow
was to be struck at Deraa. Lawrence calculated that the two thousand
new camels would supply the necessary transport for five hundred Arab
mule-mounted regulars, the battery of French quick-firing mountain-guns
that had at last been sent from Suez, machine-guns, two armoured cars,
engineers, camel-scouts and two aeroplanes. They would strike at Deraa,
destroying the junction and paralysing the Turkish communications three
days before Allenby launched his attack. Allenby had said that he would
be content if ‘three men and a boy with pistols’ were before Deraa on
September the sixteenth. This expedition was a liberal interpretation
of the phrase. The arrangements for equipping this force would be made
by the British officers at Akaba, while Lawrence went off with Buxton.
Of the part played by Lawrence in relation to these British officers,
one of them, Major Young, has written clearly enough:
‘The British officers who were helping the Arabs were at first all
under political control, but as soon as the revolt took definite
military shape a special liaison staff was formed at Allenby’s
Headquarters to deal with what were known as the Hejaz operations
and a number of officers were attached to the Arab forces. Dawnay
was officially the chief staff officer of the Hejaz liaison staff
(the telegraphic name for which was “Hedge-hog”), just as Joyce was
officially the senior British officer with Feisal’s army. But
Lawrence really counted more than either of them with Allenby and
Feisal. He used to flit backwards and forwards between the two as the
spirit moved him.
‘Besides being helped with munitions and rations Feisal was lent five
armoured cars, a flight of aeroplanes, two 10-pounder guns mounted
on Talbot cars, a detachment of twenty Indian machine-gunners, a
section of French Algerian gunners armed with four “65” mountain-guns,
an Egyptian Army battalion for guard duties at Akaba, and later
on a detachment of the Egyptian Camel Corps and a company of the
Egyptian Camel Transport to help him with his transport. All these
were under the command of Joyce ... whose staff consisted of a chief
staff-officer, a base-commandant for Akaba, a combined supply and
ordnance officer, two medical officers and a works officer. Others
drifted in and out helping with demolitions, ciphering and deciphering
telegrams, landing stores, pegging down wire roads in the sand and
doing a hundred other odd jobs.
‘Mr. [Lowell Thomas]’s cinema pictures were a triumph of journalistic
composition. But they depicted only the earlier Lawrence of the heroic
period and wrongly credited him with doing single-handed the whole of
the later work of “Hedge-hog” and of Joyce and the British staff. I
came too late, so that I practically never saw the real Elizabethan
Lawrence who characteristically drew back into his shell during that
long period of preparation after the taking of Akaba. Like the Bedouin
with whom he rode he held aloof from regular soldiers and everything
that they did. At the same time it is bare justice to give him the
chief credit for the whole series of Arab operations which ended in
the setting up of Arab rule in Damascus.’
[Illustration:
description: Photo wide shot of loaded pack mules on a rocky path
caption: MULE TRANSPORT NEAR ABA EL LISSAN
_Copyright French Army Photo Dept._
]
To this account it should be added that Colonel Joyce, the senior
British adviser to Feisal since Newcombe had been captured on a raid
in Southern Palestine, was officially Lawrence’s superior officer
throughout the campaign. He acted as commandant at Akaba until the work
at the port became too heavy to be combined with his front-line duties,
when he appointed a major from Egypt, Scott, to take on the duty. The
Arab affair was run with great economy of British helpers; it was
Lawrence’s policy to let it be managed with only one-twentieth of the
staff that a more formal side-show would have expected. It was Joyce
who decided on the main policy of the Revolt when Lawrence was off on
raids or making plans for advances. Lawrence acted as his chief source
of intelligence.
The supply and ordnance officer was Captain Goslett (who took one or
two of the photographs in this book). His view of the Arab campaign was
a very different one from Lawrence’s. The supply-question covered all
Feisal’s supporters for hundreds of miles around, and was enormous.
There were also huge trade-imports at Akaba, not directly concerned
with the campaign, for the carriage and regulation of which he was
responsible. Goslett was (and is again) a London business-man, whose
organizing ability and patience were put to a most severe test. There
were some hundreds of English at Akaba, but except for the Armoured-Car
men they were not there for fighting. They suffered no casualties,
except for the death of a corporal who was accidentally killed while
doing amateur police-work on his own.
To encourage the regular Arab officers by recognizing their great
services in the fighting about Maan and against the railway, Allenby
distributed decorations. Jaafar, the commander-in-chief, was given
a C.M.G., and Allenby delighted him by providing, as a guard of honour
for the ceremony, the same troop of Dorset Yeomanry that had gained
great credit two years before by galloping him down in the Senussi
desert and taking him prisoner. Jaafar had also won the German Iron
Cross in 1915. This double event in a single war is possibly a unique
performance.
During these months of planning, Lawrence had not (in spite of Major
Young’s account) interrupted his active adventures. One strange ride in
July took him to Kerak, Themed and Amman, all held by Turkish troops.
He was inspecting the ground for the coming Arab advance to Jericho.
At Kerak, where he arrived at midnight with a party of camel-men,
the Turks were terrified and locked themselves into their barracks,
expecting the worst. But nothing happened. The sheikh with Lawrence
merely swore that he was hungry and had a sheep killed and cooked
for him by the villagers. Later, in the pitch-dark, they stumbled
over some Turkish cavalry watering at a stream, and were fired on.
Lawrence protested with fluent Turkish curses and the Turks replying
bad-temperedly with a few more shots drew off.
Everywhere he went there was Arab hospitality, guestings and
coffee-fires at which he preached revolt, until he had made sure
of all the clans in the ladder of his advance. On the way back,
the party was mistaken for Turks by some British aeroplanes which,
swooping low, emptied drum after drum of Lewis-gun ammunition at them.
Fortunately, the shooting was bad. (Later, in reporting the affair to
Air Vice-Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond, Lawrence ironically recommended
himself for the Distinguished Flying Cross, ‘for presence of mind in
not shooting down two Bristol Fighters which were attempting to
machine-gun my party from the air.’ He had made the regulation signal
agreed upon for such cases; and had twenty automatic rifles in the
party.) As soon as the aeroplanes had disappeared, a party of Turkish
policemen tried to chase them.
Next day, near Jurf, where Lawrence was going to inspect the ground for
an attack by Arab regulars—Jurf was the only water-supply for the Turks
on that part of the line—much worse happened. A party of mixed horse
and foot from the railway cut off his retreat and more troops appeared
in front. There was no escape and the Arabs with Lawrence, taking
cover, resolved to hold out to the last. Lawrence, half-glad, saw that
all was over. He decided to imitate Farraj and end it quickly. He rode
alone against the enemy. The mounted Turks came forward to meet him,
finger on trigger, calling out ‘Testify!’ He answered: ‘There is no
god but God; and Jesus is a prophet of God’—a queer statement which no
Mohammedan could make, and yet no Christian could make either; the sort
of tactless thing that a nervous man might blurt out by mistake. They
did not shoot; they gasped, stared and cried out: ‘Aurans!’ They were
friends, a party of Arab regulars, raiding the railway, but dressed
in the uniforms of slain Turks and mounted on captured horses. Their
rifles, too, were Turkish. They had never seen Lawrence before and had
mistaken his party for members of an unfriendly Arab tribe with whom
they had just been fighting.
* * * * *
The following letter was written by Lawrence from Cairo on the
fifteenth of July, 1918, to his Oxford friend Mr. V. Richards, whose
eyesight had hitherto debarred him from active service. The
hastiness of its style would probably make Lawrence repudiate it; but
the contents are valuable as contemporary evidence of his state of mind
at this critical point in the campaign.
‘15. 7. 18.
‘Well, it was wonderful to see your writing again, and very difficult
to read it: also pleasant to have a letter which doesn’t begin
“Reference your G.S. 102487b of the 45th.” Army prose is bad, and I
have so much of it that it makes me fear contamination in my own.
‘I cannot write to anyone just now. Your letter came to me in Aba el
Lissan, a little hill-fort on the plateau of Arabia S.E. of the Dead
Sea, and I carried it with me down to Akaba, to Jidda, and then here
to answer. Yet with all that I have had it only a month, and you wrote
it three months ago. This letter will be submarined, and then it is
all over for another three years.
‘It always seemed to me that your eyes would prevent all service for
you, and that in consequence you might preserve your continuity. For
myself, I have been so violently uprooted, and plunged so deeply into
a job too big for me, that everything feels unreal. I have dropped
everything I ever did, and live only as a thief of opportunity,
snatching chances of the moment when and where I see them. My people
have probably told you that the job is to foment an Arab rebellion
against Turkey, and for that I have to try to hide my Frankish
exterior, and be as little out of the Arab picture as I can. So it’s
a kind of foreign stage, on which one plays day and night, in fancy
dress, in a strange language, with the price of failure on one’s head
if the part is not well filled.
‘You guessed rightly that the Arab appealed to my imagination.
It is the old old civilization, which has refined itself clear of
household gods, and half the trappings which ours hastens to assume.
The gospel of bareness in materials is a good one, and it involves
apparently a sort of moral bareness too. Arabs think for the moment,
and endeavour to slip through life without turning corners or climbing
hills. In part it is a mental and moral fatigue, a race trained out,
and to avoid difficulties they have to jettison so much that we think
honourable and brave: and yet without in any way sharing their point
of view, I think I can understand it enough to look at myself and
other foreigners from their direction, and without condemning it. I
know I’m a stranger to them, and always will be: but I cannot believe
them worse, any more than I could change to their ways.
‘This is a very long porch to explain why I’m always trying to blow
up railway trains and bridges instead of looking for the well at the
world’s end. Anyway, these years of detachment have cured me of any
desire ever to do anything for myself. When they untie my bonds I will
not find in me any spur to action. However, actually one never thinks
of afterwards: the time from the beginning is like one of those dreams
which seems to last for aeons, and then you wake up with a start, and
find that it has left nothing in your mind. Only the different thing
about this dream is that so many people do not wake up in this life
again.
‘I cannot imagine what my people can have told you.[5] Until now
we have only been preparing the groundwork and bases of our revolt,
and do not yet stand on the brink of action. Whether we are going to
win or lose, when we do strike, I cannot ever persuade myself. The
whole thing is such a play, and one cannot put conviction into one’s
day dreams. If we succeed I will have done well with the materials
given me, and that disposes of your “lime light.” If we fail, and
they have patience, then I suppose we will go on digging foundations.
Achievement, if it comes, will have a great disillusionment, but not
great enough to wake me up.
[5] Mrs. Lawrence had written: ‘Ned has been in the Hejaz fighting
with the Arabs against the Turks for the last year and more. He has
been doing wonderful things, blowing up trains, bridges, etc., and
killing Turks by the hundred. He has had all sorts of decorations,
which he ignores. He says that if any private letters are sent giving
his rank and honours he will return them unopened.’ ...
‘Your mind has evidently moved far since 1914. That is a privilege
you have won by being kept out of the mist for so long. You’ll find
the rest of us aged undergraduates, possibly still unconscious of
our unfitting grey hair. For that reason I cannot follow or return
your steps. A house with no action entailed, quiet, and liberty to
think and abstain as one wills—yes, I think abstention, the leaving
everything alone and watching the others still going past, is what I
would choose to-day, if things ceased driving me. This may be only
the reaction from four years’ opportunism, and is not worth trying to
resolve into terms of geography and employment.
‘Of course the ideal is that of the “lords who are” still “certainly
expected,”[6] but the certainty is not for us, I’m afraid. Also for
very few would the joy be so perfect as to be silent. Those words
peace, silence, rest, and the others take on a vividness in the
midst of noise and worry and weariness like a lighted window in the
dark. Yet what on earth is the good of a lighted window? and perhaps
it is only because one is overborne and tired. You know when one
marches across an interminable plain a hill (which is still the worst
hill on earth) is a banquet, and after searing heat cold water takes
on a quality (what would they have said without this word before?)
impossible in the eyes of a fen-farmer. Probably I’m only a sensitized
film, turned black or white by the objects projected on me: and if
so what hope is there that next week or year, or to-morrow, can be
prepared for to-day?
[6] A reference to a previous letter of his own from Cairo in 1915:
‘You know Coleridge’s description of the heavenly bodies in _The
Ancient Mariner_. “Lords that are certainly expected” ... etc. I
don’t want to be a lord or a heavenly body, but I think that one end
of my orbit should be in a printing-shed with you. Shall we begin by
printing Apuleius’ _Golden Ass_, my present stand-by?’
‘This is an idiot letter, and amounts to nothing except a cry for a
further change, which is idiocy, for I change my abode every day,
and my job every two days, and my language every three days, and
still remain always unsatisfied. I hate being in front, and I hate
being back and I don’t like responsibility, and I don’t obey orders.
Altogether no good just now. A long quiet like a purge and then a
contemplation and decision of future roads, that is what is to look
forward to.