flying Turk, and we have it all, for that is part or the mise-en-scène
or the successful raider, and hitherto I am that. My bodyguard of
fifty Arab tribesmen, picked riders from the young men of the deserts,
are more splendid than a tulip garden, and we ride like lunatics and
with our Beduin pounce on unsuspecting Turks and destroy them in
heaps: and it is all very gory and nasty after we close grips. I love
the preparation, and the journey, and loathe the physical fighting.
Disguises, and prices on one’s head, and fancy exploits are all part
of the pose: how to reconcile it with the Oxford pose I know not.
Were we flamboyant there?
‘If you reply—you will perceive I have matting of the brain—and your
thoughts are in control, please tell me of B—, and if possible W—.
The latter was the man for all these things, because he would take a
baresark beery pleasure in physical outputs....
‘L.’
XXIV
The plan that Lawrence had in mind for Buxton’s camel-corps was this:
it would start from the Suez Canal, across Sinai to Akaba, arriving on
the second of August. The next step was from Akaba through the passes
to Rumm. From Rumm it would make a raid on Mudowwara which was still
holding out after having been threatened for over a year, and destroy
the Turkish water-supply, thereby completing the strangle-hold on
Medina. From Mudowwara it would go by the old Jefer and Bair route to
Kissir on the railway, three miles south of Amman, to destroy the big
bridge and tunnel which the British cavalry and camel raid had left
undamaged: this would delay the Turkish relief of Maan for three weeks,
by which time Allenby’s offensive would be beginning. The camel-corps
would then be back on Allenby’s front by way of Tafileh and Beersheba
on August the thirtieth.
Besides the Englishmen Lawrence would take his own body-guard and
pick up sponsors from other Arab tribes as he went. The ride was a
great responsibility for him. To take a large body of Christian troops
in khaki through Arab tribal territory was at least as dangerous an
adventure as the fighting that had to be done against the Turks. He
asked Buxton’s leave to address the men, without their officers, before
they started. I have had from one of them an account of his speech,
and the extraordinary impression it made on him and his comrades. At
first sight they had not trusted Lawrence in the least, disliking his
Bedouin dress and Bedouin gestures; whispering that he was a spy and
would betray them. But once he began to talk: ‘We are about to start
on a trip so long and difficult that the Staff believe we won’t
manage it ...,’ he captured their imaginations. He knew the value of
the appeal to personal vanity. He told them that they had to ride a
thousand miles in thirty days, nearly twice the set daily march of
their brigade, through desert country, on short rations for man and
beast, with two difficult night-attacks on Turkish posts thrown in. Any
delay in the march would mean thirst or starvation, probably both, and
if they wore out their camels by careless riding they would be stranded
in the desert and would probably never return. He asked them to be very
patient with the excitable Arabs, particularly at the wells.
[Illustration:
description: Map 200x600 miles of Palestine and Arabia centered
around the Dead Sea
title caption: THE CAMPAIGN IN THE NORTH
]
Buxton’s first impression of Lawrence can be given in a quotation from
a private letter that he wrote home on the fourth of August. He was at
Rumm watering the camels at the springs in the great amphitheatre; with
great difficulty, for the Beni Atiyeh tribe were there too, watering
a thousand camels a day, and jealousy for first turn might lead to
disturbance and bloodshed:
‘_August_ 4_th_, 1918. 4_th Anniversary of War_.
‘RUMM.
‘I am sitting between two rocks with a waterproof sheet overhead,
somewhere in the middle of Arabia, between Akaba and the Euphrates.
It is a place with rocky mountains on each side of me which last
night in the evening light became a most wonderful rosy red colour
growing purple as the shadow fell across them. The wells are about
three hundred yards up a stiff cliff, and the difficulties of watering
camels are terrific. We have been watering camels the last thirty-six
hours continuously day and night, and I hope to get off with my column
this evening. We are here very much under sufferance of the
Sherif, and none of the inhabitants and Arabs here like us at all, and
rifles which reverberate like a battle are continuously going off.
Lawrence and his odd-looking cut-throat band have just left us to
rejoin the Sherif near Maan, and we have now Nasir, a relation of the
Sherif, who acts as intermediary between us and the Arabs.
‘Our first night attack against the Turks will take place about forty
miles from here, two nights ahead. To-morrow about daybreak I go on
with Nasir and two or three of my officers dressed as Arabs, or rather
with Arab head-gear and coat, to give the proper “silhouette” effect,
and we do a personal reconnaissance of the places to be attacked about
sunset and then rejoin the column on the march after making plans for
the attack.
‘Lawrence has started all this Arab movement. He is only a boy to look
at, has a very quiet, sedate manner, a fine head but insignificant
body. He is known to every Arab in this country for his personal
bravery and train-wrecking exploits. I don’t know whether it is his
intrepidity, disinterestedness and mysteriousness which appeal to the
Arab most, or his success in finding them rich trains to blow up and
loot. After a train success he tells me the army is like Barnum’s
show and gradually disintegrates. At any rate it is wonderful what he
has accomplished with the poor tools at his disposal. His influence
is astounding not only on the misbeguided natives, but also I think
on his brother officers and seniors. Out here he lives entirely with
the Arabs, wears their clothes, eats only their food, and bears all
the burdens that the lowliest of them does. He always travels in
spotless white, and in fact reminds one of a Prince of Mecca more than
anything. He will join us again later, I hope, as his presence is
very stimulating to us all and one has the feeling that things cannot
go wrong while he is there.....’
Lawrence had ridden off not to Maan, as Buxton’s letter says, but to
Akaba where he collected his body-guard, sixty strong, and rode with
them to Guweira. El Zaagi had sorted them out in Ageyl fashion to ride
in a long line with a poet to right and a poet to left, each among
the best singers. Lawrence was on Ghazala, whose calf had recently
died and left her in great grief. Abdulla the Robber, riding next to
Lawrence, carried the calf’s dried pelt behind his saddle. Ghazala in
the middle of the singing began to tread uneasily, remembering her
grief, and stopped, gently moaning. Abdulla leaped off his camel and
spread the pelt before her. She stopped crying and sniffed at it three
or four times, then whimpering went on again. This happened several
times that day but in the end she forgot her grief. At Guweira he
left his body-guard to wait. An aeroplane took him to Jefer—to Feisal
who was there with Nuri, the Emir of the Ruwalla. It was Nuri who
had given Lawrence and Auda leave a year before to ride through his
territory on the way to Akaba. He had now to be asked a far greater
favour, the passage through his country of British troops and armoured
cars. If he consented it would mean war with the Turks toward whom,
at Feisal’s request, he had so far kept up a show of friendship. Nuri
was a hard, short-spoken old man of seventy, and it was with great
relief that Feisal and Lawrence heard his plain ‘Yes.’ It came at the
end of a great conference of all the Ruwalla chiefs where Feisal and
Lawrence in the tent at twilight sat preaching revolt. The combination
was irresistible; their method perfected after two years was to
say just enough to set the Ruwalla imagination on fire so that the
tribesmen almost believed themselves the inventors of the idea and
began spurring Feisal and Lawrence to greater enthusiasm and more
desperate action.
Lawrence’s short stay at Rumm with Buxton’s men had made him home-sick
for England. (It was an ideal England which he loved with a perverse
Anglo-Irish sentiment which was quite compatible with being out of
sympathy with most Englishmen.) So here at Jefer he accused himself of
play-acting, of continuing his cruel fraud on the Arabs for the sake of
England’s victory.
But then Nuri once more came to him with documents. The English
Government had been working with its foreign departments still at
odds together. Besides the original pledges to the Sherif promising
Arab independence and the later Sykes-Picot treaty partitioning up
the Arab area between England, France and Russia, there were now two
more statements: a promise made to seven prominent Arabs at Cairo
that the Arabs should keep such territory as they conquered from the
Turks during the war, and a promise to the Zionists for a Jewish
National Home in Palestine. Which of all these was Nuri to believe?
Once more Lawrence smiled and said, ‘The latest in date.’ Nuri took it
good-humouredly and ever afterwards helped Lawrence well, yet warned
him with a smile: ‘But if ever henceforth I fail to keep a promise,’
said Nuri, ‘it will be because I have superseded it with a later
intention.’
Lawrence’s loyalty was further tried by his discovery that negotiations
had been begun between the British Government and the Conservative
Turks about the terms of Turkey’s surrender. The news did not come to
him officially but privately through friends in Turkey, and the
Arabs had not been first consulted. This was most unfortunate because
the Conservatives, unlike their powerful opponents the Nationalists
(headed by Kemal, the present head of the Turkish Republic), were
most unwilling to allow Arab governments to be set up in Syria. The
British proposals would have been fatal to many of the Arabs already
in arms for freedom. Lawrence therefore encouraged Feisal to begin
a correspondence with the Kemalists, so that in case Allenby’s
thrust failed and a separate peace were made by the British with the
Conservative Turks, there might still be a chance of winning and
holding Damascus by alliance with the Turkish Nationalists against the
Conservatives.
It seems that after all this Lawrence did not quite know where he was,
and the only relief as usual for his distress of mind was violent
action and a longing for death to end his shame. Yet from actual
suicide he shrank. That would be to take death far too seriously; it
would not be cowardice but a flippancy unworthy of a serious person
like himself. The most that he could allow himself was a constant
exposure to danger, leaving himself only the narrowest margin of safety
and always hoping for an accident. Accidents, however, though numerous
were never fatal; he was too scrupulous about keeping the honourable
margin. If he had not been so much in love with the idea of death, he
would have been killed a hundred times over.
Nuri’s young nephew Bender begged Lawrence before all the chiefs to
give him a place in the body-guard. He had heard wild tales of its
excessive joys and sorrows from Rahail, his foster-brother, with whom
Lawrence had made the ride from Azrak. Lawrence did not want Bender;
a luxurious young man who was too much of a responsibility. But
Lawrence could not shame him in front of the chiefs, so he turned
the request by asking, ‘Am I a king to have Ruwalla princes as my
servants?’ Nuri’s eye met Lawrence’s in silent approval.
From this meeting with Nuri he flew back to Guweira, and from there
decided to go forward with the armoured cars as far as Azrak to prepare
Buxton’s road. They crossed the railway safely and at Bair met Buxton
coming up with his camel-corps from the attack on Mudowwara. He had
captured the place and its garrison of about a hundred and forty men
with a loss of four killed and ten wounded; destroyed the wells,
the engine pumps and the great water-tower, and more than a mile of
rails. The only trouble was that the supply-column that accompanied
him had left the last stop, Jefer, half-mutinous with fear of the
desert and had lost, stolen or sold a third of the rations which the
baggage camels were carrying. So the force had to be reduced by fifty
of Buxton’s least needed men, a hundred camels, and one of the two
armoured cars. There was great delay at Bair, watering at the only two
wells. At one of these there were six hundred camels of the Howeitat
and Beni Sakhr, and at the other a mob of a thousand Druses, Syrian
refugees, Damascus merchants and Armenians, all on their way to Akaba.
Lawrence helped Buxton with the watering: the Howeitat were astonished
at the English, never having imagined that there were so many of that
tribe in the world.
It was Lawrence’s thirtieth birthday and he made it the occasion for a
long self-examination, an inquiry into his personality, and his desire
to understand his personality, and the difficulties and deceits arising
from his desire to understand his personality by testing its effect
on others. His desire to be liked and his ambition to be famous,
and his cautious or shamefaced restraint of both these impulses. His
refusal to believe good of himself or his works; his actual dislike of
as much of himself as he could see and hear and feel.
At this point he was roused by shouts and shots. He was afraid that
a quarrel had broken out between Buxton’s men and the tribesmen, but
it was only an appeal for help against the Shammar who some miles
away had driven off eighty Howeitat camels. By the time that he had
sent in pursuit four or five relatives of the men robbed, his train
of thought was broken. They went forward then. Lawrence’s body-guard
were, for this ride, set to lead or drive the baggage camels carrying
the six thousand pounds of gun-cotton for the blowing up of the bridge.
They were disgusted at this unexciting and menial task, particularly
as their charges were very slow Somali camels which could do no more
than three miles an hour. El Zaagi urged them on, taunting them with
being coolies and drovers, offering to buy their goods when they came
to market, and made them laugh in spite of themselves. They kept up
by lengthening the marches into the night and stealing time from the
breakfast and midday halts. They brought the caravan through without
the loss of a single beast, a fine performance for such gilded
gentlemen; but then, they were the best camel-masters for hire in all
Arabia.
Lawrence was delighted with the Imperial Camel-Corps. Buxton had
revised all the hard-and-fast rules of march discipline. His men
no longer rode in line but in irregular clumps, each man picking
his easiest way over the bad ground. He had reduced and re-hung the
loads, and broken the old clockwork system of halting once every hour.
Each march his men became more workmanlike, more at home on
their animals, tougher, leaner, faster. If only the Indian camel-men
had learned to accommodate themselves in the same way to irregular
fighting, the Yarmuk bridge raid of the previous autumn might have
ended successfully.
[Illustration:
description: Photos three wide sequential shots of a building
and water-tower being blown up
caption: BUXTON’S MEN BLOWING UP MUDOWWARA STATION
_Copyright_
]
However, Kissir bridge and tunnel escaped too. On August the twentieth
they came within sight of the railway and hid in the ruins of a Roman
temple some miles off. Lawrence sent forward members of his body-guard
who were peasants of the district to scout in the three villages
between them and the bridge. They returned to say that by bad luck
Turkish tax-gatherers were in the villages that night, measuring out
the heaps of corn on the threshing-floors under guard of troops of
mounted infantry. Three such troops were in the three villages nearest
the great bridge, villages close to which they would have to pass on
their way to blow it up. And a Turkish aeroplane had come over their
column that morning and probably seen them. They took counsel. Lawrence
had no doubt that Buxton’s men could deal with the Turkish bridge-guard
and blow up the bridge. The only question was whether the business was
worth its cost in British lives. The plan was to dismount nearly a mile
from the bridge and advance on foot. The blowing up of the bridge with
three tons of gun-cotton would wake up the whole district and Turkish
patrols might stumble on the camel-park, which would be a disaster.
Buxton’s men could not, like Arabs, scatter like a swarm of birds after
the explosion, to find their own way back. In night-fighting some of
them would be sure to be cut off. They might lose altogether fifty men.
This was too expensive. The destruction of the bridge, anyhow, was only
to frighten and disturb the Turks so that they would leave Maan
alone until August the thirtieth, when the great attack on Deraa was to
be made from Azrak. This was already the twentieth. The danger seemed
nearly over now, for the Turks had wasted the last month, doing nothing.
Buxton’s men were most disappointed when they heard that the raid was
off, but Lawrence reassured them that the chief object of their coming
would be gained. He sent men down to the villages to spread reports of
a coming great attack on Amman, of which this was the advance guard. It
was what the Turks dreaded most; patrols were sent up at once to report
on the truth of the villagers’ wild reports, and found the hill-top,
where the raiders had been, littered with empty meat tins, and the
valley slopes cut up by the tracks of enormous cars. Very many tracks
there were; as Lawrence, with his single car, had taken care that there
should be. This alarm checked them for a week; the destruction of the
bridge would only have added a few days more. The expedition returned
by way of Azrak, where the Englishmen bathed in the pools, and to Bair
(shouting ‘Are we well fed? No! Do we see life? Yes!’), where they
found a few more ‘iron rations’ dumped for them from Akaba. Then Buxton
took them back to Palestine. Lawrence returned with the armoured cars
to Akaba.
XXV
At Akaba preparations for the grand expedition of all arms to cut the
railways at Deraa were complete—so complete that Dawnay and Joyce were
both for the moment on holiday. Lawrence was glad to be there to cope
with a most unexpected and absurd situation. The Sherif, Hussein, had
issued a Royal Gazette from Mecca with a proclamation to the effect
that fools were calling Jaafar Pasha the General Officer Commanding
the Arab Northern Army, whereas there was no such rank, indeed no rank
higher than captain in the Arab Army, in which Sheikh Jaafar, like many
another, was doing his duty. Hussein had heard of Jaafar’s C.M.G. and
had published this proclamation in jealousy without warning Feisal. He
intended by it to spite the Syrian and Mesopotamian Arabs in Feisal’s
army. They were fighting, he knew, to free their own countries for
self-government, but he was aiming at a regular Arab Empire which he
was ambitious to rule from Mecca, with the spiritual leadership of
the Mohammedan world thrown in. Jaafar and all the Arab officers at
once resigned. Feisal refused the resignations, pointing out that
their commissions as officers were issued by himself and he alone
was disgraced by the proclamation. He telegraphed to Mecca resigning
command. Hussein appointed Zeid in his place. Zeid promptly refused
to take command. Hussein sent threatening messages by cable and all
military life was at an end from Akaba to Aba el Lissan.
Lawrence had to do something. The first alternative was to put
pressure on Hussein to withdraw his statement; the second to ignore
the humours of this narrow-minded old man of seventy, and carry on;
the third, to set up Feisal in independence of his father and,
when Damascus fell, try to give him a throne there. But the difficulty
was that the expedition had to start in three days’ time if it was
to reach Deraa before Allenby began his advance. The first course
was best, to avoid the appearance of dissension among the Arabs, but
might take weeks. So Allenby and the High Commissioner of Egypt (who
provided Hussein’s subsidy) were at once set to work on the Sherif,
whose answers to Feisal through them were cabled across to Akaba in
cipher. Lawrence, remembering Hussein’s trick on the telephone, saw to
it that the cable-station at Akaba only accepted the desirable parts
of the messages and made a hopeless jumble of the others, notifying
these to Mecca as ‘corrupt.’ Fortunately Hussein instead of repeating
the censored passages, toned them down until at last there came a
long message, the first half a lame apology and withdrawal of the
proclamation, the other a renewal of the offence in a new form.
[Illustration:
description: Photo wide shot of men standing and on horses facing
forward; Mohammed el Dheilan, Feisal, and Jaafar
indicated
caption: AT GUWEIRA
_Copyright French Army Photo Dept._
]
Lawrence suppressed this second half and took the first to Feisal
marked ‘very urgent.’ The secretary decoded it and Feisal read it aloud
to the staff about him, concealing his surprise at the meek words of
his usually obstinate and tyrannical old father. At the end he said,
‘The telegraph has saved all our honour.’ Without Feisal the great
expedition to Deraa, which it was hoped might mean also Damascus, would
have been incomplete and Lawrence had pressed him to come in spite of
his father; Feisal having resigned his command had offered very nobly
to come under Lawrence’s. So now he bent towards Lawrence, adding
in an undertone: ‘I mean the honour of nearly all of us.’ Lawrence
said demurely, ‘I do not understand what you mean.’ Feisal answered,
‘I offered to serve for this last march under your orders, why
was that not enough? Because it would not go with your honour,’ said
Lawrence. ‘You always prefer mine before your own,’ Feisal murmured,
then sprang up energetically to his feet saying, ‘Now, sirs, praise God
and work!’
The expedition started only a day late. Lawrence first had to suppress
a mutiny among the Arab regular soldiers who knew something bad
was happening, but had heard only the false rumour that Feisal had
deserted. He had not been seen out of his tent for a week. The gunners
thought that their officers were betraying them and ran to turn the
guns on their tents. However, Rasim had foreseen this and, secretly
collecting the breech-blocks in his own tent, had outwitted them. At
this ludicrous moment Lawrence came smiling along and talked to the
men, telling as a great joke the whole story of Hussein’s proclamation
and the resignations; they laughed like schoolboys at the private
quarrels of their leaders. Feisal then appeared, driving through the
lines in his Vauxhall car which was painted with the holy green colour
of the Prophet’s family; and the situation was saved.
Lawrence went by armoured car to Azrak and at Bair heard the news that
the Turks at Hesa had moved suddenly to Tafileh and were advancing
south to the relief of Maan. The chief of the Beni Sakhr who brought
the news thought Lawrence mad when he laughed aloud. But, now that
the expedition had started, the Turks might relieve Maan and take Aba
el Lissan, Guweira, Akaba itself for all he cared. The news meant
that the Turks believed in the pretended threat to Amman and were
making a counter-stroke. Every man that they sent south was a man, or
rather ten men lost. Deraa was all that mattered now. To complete the
deception Lawrence had sent thousands of his ‘horsemen of St.
George’ (British sovereigns) to the Beni Sakhr tribe to purchase all
the barley on their threshing-floors for a force that would be shortly
coming along from Azrak, through their villages, towards Amman. The
Turks got the news soon, as was intended. Hornby was going in charge of
the other expedition to join up with Allenby at Jericho, so that if the
Deraa plan failed the combined parties could make the feint on Amman
a reality. But the Turkish advance on Tafileh checked him and he had
instead to defend Shobek against them.