Lawrence and the Arabs

by Robert Graves

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.

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.

Lawrence’s first stop was Jefer, where he had been before on the ride to Akaba and had repaired the damaged well: he took his party safely across the silver plain of polished mud and salt, and near Jefer found Auda encamped with a few of his tribesmen, including Zaal and Mohammed el Dheilan. The old man was having a violent dispute over the distribution of wages which he drew in bulk for the whole tribe, and was ashamed to be found in such difficulties. However, Lawrence did what he could to smooth them over and by giving the Arabs something else to think about, made them smile; which was half the battle. He then went to Zaal and explained his plan to destroy the Yarmuk bridges. Zaal disliked it very much. He had been most successful that summer in his fighting with the Turks, and wealth made life precious to him. And the train-ambush at Mudowwara from which he had barely escaped with his life had tried his nerve; so now he said that he would only come if Lawrence insisted. Lawrence did not insist. Lloyd having to go home at this point, he was left despondent among the Arabs to unending talk of war and tribes and camels.

The first thing was to help Auda to settle the money disputes and to light again in the Howeitat the flame of enthusiasm now nearly extinct after months of hardship. At dark Lawrence sat by Auda’s camp-fire, an Arab once more, talking in the hot persuasive tones that he had caught from Feisal, gradually kindling them to remember their oath, their promise to put the war with the Turks before all disputes and jealousy. He won them over, man by man, addressing them by name, reminding them of their ancestral glories, of their own brave deeds, of Feisal’s bounty, of the baseness and the approaching collapse of the Turks. He was still at work near midnight when Auda held up his camel-stick for silence. They listened, wondering what the danger was, and after a while heard a rumble, a muttering like a very distant thunderstorm. Auda said: ‘The English guns.’ Allenby, a hundred miles north across the hills, was beginning the preparatory bombardment for his next day’s successful attack on Beersheba, with Gaza to fall five days later. This sound closed the argument. The Arabs were always convinced by heavy artillery. When Lawrence and his party left the camp the next day in a happier atmosphere than they had found it, Auda gratefully came up and embraced Lawrence with ‘Peace be with you.’ But he also took the opportunity of the embrace to whisper windily, while his rough beard brushed Lawrence’s ear: ‘Beware of Abd el Kader.’ He could not say more; there were too many people about.

They continued that day, the thirty-first of October, towards Bair. The winter was approaching; it was now a time of peaceful weather with misty dawns, mild sunlight and an evening chill. The Indians were such bad camel-masters that they could manage no more than thirty-five miles a day—fifty was the least that an Arab would think of doing on a long march—and had to stop to eat three meals a day. The midday halt brought an alarm. Men on horses and camels were seen riding up from the north and west and closing in on the party. Rifles were snatched up and the Indians ran to their machine-guns. In thirty seconds the defence was ready; Ali ibn el Hussein cried out, ‘Hold the fire until they come close.’ Then one of Lawrence’s body-guard, belonging to a despised clan of serfs, the Sherarat, but a devoted servant and brave fighter, sprang up laughing and waved his sleeve in the air as a signal of friendship. They fired at him, or perhaps over him. He lay down and fired back, one shot only over the head of the nearest man; that perplexed them, but after awhile they waved back in answer. Then he went forward, protected by the rifles of his party, to meet a man of the enemy, also advancing alone; it was a raiding party of Arabs of the Beni Sakhr tribe who pretended to be much surprised on hearing whom they had been about to attack, and rode in to apologize.

Ali ibn el Hussein was furious with the Beni Sakhr for their treacherous attack: they answered sullenly that it was their custom to shoot over the heads of strangers in the desert. ‘A good custom,’ said Ali, ‘for the desert. But to come on us suddenly from three sides at once seems to me more like a carefully prepared ambush.’ Border Arabs like the Beni Sakhr were always dangerous, being not villagers enough to have forgotten the Bedouin love of raiding, not Bedouin enough to keep the strict desert code of honour. (There is a Scottish proverb that I learned from Lawrence’s mother, who speaking of another Border, quoted: ‘The selvage is aye the warst part o’ the web.’) The Beni Sakhr raiders, ashamed, went forward to Bair to give warning of the approach of the party. Their chief thought it best to make up for the bad reception that such important men as Ali ibn el Hussein and Lawrence had been given, by preparing a great feast for them. First there was a public reception, every man and horse in the tribe turned out, and there were wild cheers of welcome, volleys in the air, gallopings and curvetings: and clouds of dust. ‘God give victory to our Sherif,’ they shouted to Ali, and to Lawrence, ‘Welcome, Aurans, forerunner of fighting!’

Abd el Kader grew jealous. He began to show off, climbing up on the high Moorish saddle of his mare, and with his seven Algerian servants behind him in a file began the same prancing and curveting, shouting out ‘Houp! Houp!’ and firing a pistol unsteadily in the air. The Beni Sakhr chief came up to Ali and Lawrence, saying, ‘Lords, please call off your servant. He cannot either shoot or ride, and if he hits someone, he will destroy our good luck of to-day.’ The chief did not know Abd el Kader’s family reputation for ‘accidental’ shootings in Damascus. His brother Mohammed Said had had three successive fatal accidents among his friends, so that Ali Riza, the Governor of Damascus and a secret pro-Arab, once said: ‘Three things are notably impossible. The first, that Turkey should win this war. The second, that the Mediterranean should become champagne. The third, that I should be found in the same room with Mohammed Said, and he to be armed.’

Ali had a little business to settle before dinner. A party of negro workmen had been sent by Feisal to re-line the blasted well from which Lawrence and Nasir had picked the gelignite on the way to Akaba. They had been here for months, living on the forced hospitality of the Beni Sakhr and doing no work. Feisal had asked Ali to see what was happening. Ali hurriedly held a court, tried them, found them guilty and had them beaten, out of sight, by his own negroes. They returned stiffly, kissed hands to show repentance and respect, and soon the whole party, including the masons, were kneeling down at the feast.

The Beni Sakhr hospitality was even richer than that of the Howeitat. Lawrence, Ali and the rest ate ravenously, for good manners, at mutton and rice which was soused in so much liquid butter that they splashed their clothes and greased their faces in their first polite haste. The pace was slackening somewhat, though the meal was far from its end, when Abd el Kader grunted, rose to his feet, wiped his hands on a handkerchief and sat back on the carpets by the tent wall. Lawrence and the rest did not know whether to rise too, for the custom was for all to rise together. They looked to Ali their leader, but he merely grunted ‘the boor!’ and the eating went on until everyone was full and had begun licking his fingers. Then Ali cleared his throat as the usual signal, and they went back to the carpets, while the next relay fed and then the children. Lawrence watched one little five-year-old in a filthy smock stuffing with both hands until at the end, with swollen stomach and shining face, it could manage no more. Then it staggered off speechlessly, a huge unpicked mutton-rib hugged to its breast. In the corner the chiefs slave was eating his customary portion, the sheep’s head; splitting the skull and sucking the brain. In front of the tent the dogs crunched their bones.

As for Abd el Kader, he had not been behaving badly according to his own standards or indeed those of the border, which allowed the full-fed man to go off at his own time. But Ali was a sherif and a hero and therefore the good manners of the central desert ruled for that feast. So Abd el Kader was ashamed. He tried to carry it off by worse behaviour. He sat spitting, grunting and picking his teeth, and to show his grandeur further, sent a servant for his medicine chest and poured himself out a dose, grumbling that such tough meat gave him indigestion. This was abominable. Lawrence had once met a chief with a scar right across his cheek which he had come by in this way: he had been politely gulping food at a feast when he had begun to choke; unable to speak but anxious to explain that this was not meant as an insult, he had slit his mouth to the ear with his dagger to show that it was only a piece of meat stuck behind his back teeth.

As the party sat about the tribal coffee-hearth, all but Abd el Kader who had gone off to a fire of his own, they heard the guns again thudding away in preparation for the second day’s bombardment of Gaza. It was a good moment for telling the chief why they had come. Lawrence said that they proposed a raid near Deraa and asked him for help. He did not mention the bridge, after his failure to get Zaal and his men; it might seem too forlorn a hope. However, the chief agreed to come himself and chose out fifteen of his best men and his own son Turki, a brave boy of seventeen, though ambitious and greedy like his father. He was an old friend of Ali’s. Lawrence gave Turki a new silk robe, and he strutted among the tents in it, without his cloak, crying shame on any man who held back from the adventure.

That night they rode out from Bair, in company with the Beni Sakhr men. Their chief had first to pay his respects to his dead ancestor whose grave was near that of Auda’s son. He decided that, as there was great danger ahead, he would make a propitiatory offering of a head-cord to add to the ragged collection looped round the gravestone. And as the raid was Lawrence’s idea, he thought he might ask Lawrence to provide one. Lawrence handed over a rich red silk and silver ornament, remarking with a smile that the virtue of the offering lay with the giver. The thrifty chief man pressed a halfpenny on Lawrence to make a pretence of purchase and get the virtue for himself. A few weeks later Lawrence passed by again and noticed that the head-cord was gone. The chief cursed loudly in his hearing at the sacrilege. Some godless Sherari, he said, had robbed his ancestor: but Lawrence could guess where it really was.

Lawrence nearly succumbed to the idleness that the weather invited the next day. But he had to be busy learning to recognize the tribal dialect of the Beni Sakhr, and making mental notes of the bits of family-history that the tribesmen gave him in casual conversation. Family-history and tribal custom were to these desert people in place of books. Nothing was so wearing, and yet nothing so important as the detailed memory that Lawrence had in good manners to cultivate, whenever he met a new tribe, for relationships and feuds and ancestry and the ownership of camels and similar matters. When they halted that night the noise of Allenby’s guns was very loud and clear, possibly because the hollows of the Dead Sea sent the noise echoing up to their high plateau. The Arabs whispered, ‘They are nearer. The English are advancing. God deliver the men under that rain!’ They were thinking of the Turks, so long their weak and corrupt oppressors whom now they loved more, in their moment of defeat, than the strong foreigner with his blind unswerving justice, their victor.

The next day they went forward over ridges of sun-browned flints so closely grown over with a tiny saffron plant that the whole view was golden with it; and about noon saw from the top of a ridge a party of trotting camels coming fast towards them. Turki cantered forward, with carbine ready cocked, to see who the strangers were, but while they were still a mile off the Beni Sakhr chief recognized his kinsmen Fahad and Adhub, famous fighters, the war-leaders of the clan. They had heard the news of the raid and ridden at once to join it. Lawrence was glad of them. The next halt was Ammari in Sirhan where there were water-pools among the salty hummocks. They were mostly too bitter to drink, though there was one which was thought very good by contrast. It lay in a limestone hollow and the water, which tasted of mixed brine and ammonia, was of a deep yellow colour. Into this pool, for a joke, Daud pushed Farraj fully dressed; he sank out of view and then rose quietly to the surface at the side of the pool under an overhanging rock-ledge and lay hid: Daud waited for him to rise, but when there was no sign of him, got into an agony of anxiety about his friend and, tearing off his cloak, jumped in after him. There was Farraj smiling under the ledge. They were fine swimmers, having once been pearl-divers in the Persian Gulf. Afterwards they began scuffling in the sand beside the water-pool. They returned to Lawrence’s camp-fire, dripping wet, in rags, bleeding and covered with mud and thorns, most unlike their usual foppish selves. They then had the impudence to say that they had tripped over a bush while dancing, and that it would be like Lawrence’s generosity if he gave them new clothes. He did nothing of the kind, but sent them off at once to clean themselves up.

The next day there was another alarm, which again proved a false one. It was only a party of a hundred Serahin tribesmen on their way to offer allegiance to Feisal. Now that they could give the oath to Ali ibn el Hussein instead and be spared the long dangerous journey through the territory of other tribes and across the Turkish railway, they turned about with joy. They came back singing to their tents the same day as they had started out, and there was a great welcome for the combined party. After more mutton and bread and some sleepless hours on the verminous rugs offered them, which they could not politely refuse, Lawrence and Ali ibn el Hussein roused the old chief and his lieutenant, and explained the intentions of the raid. They listened gravely but said that the western bridge at Gadara was impossible because the Turks had just filled the woods about it with hundreds of military wood-cutters; the bridges in the middle they would not like to visit under the guidance of Abd el Kader whom they mistrusted and who would be among his own villagers there; the eastern bridge by Tell el Shehab was in the country of their blood-enemies who might take the opportunity to attack them in the rear. Also, if it rained the camels would not be able to trot over the muddy plains on the farther side of the line between Azrak and the bridges, and the whole party might be cut off and killed.

This was very bad. The Serahin were Lawrence’s last hope and, if they refused to come, it would be impossible to destroy the bridge by the day that Allenby asked for it to be destroyed. So Ali ibn el Hussein and Lawrence collected the better men of the tribe and set them round the camp-fire with the chief of the Beni Sakhr and Fahad and Adhub to break cold prudence down with desperate talk. Though duty to Allenby provided the occasion, Lawrence was true Arab now, preaching with a prophetic eloquence the gospel of revolt. Its glory, he urged, lay in bitterness and suffering, and the sacrifice of the body to the spirit. Failure was even more glorious than success; it was better to defy a hostile Fate by choosing out the sure road to death, proudly throwing away the poor resources of physical life and prosperity and so making Fate ashamed at the poorness of its victory. To honourable men the forlorn hope was the only goal, and if by chance they escaped alive, then the next forlorn hope. They must believe that there was no final victory except at last after innumerable hazards to go down to death, still fighting. The Serahin listened entranced; their worldliness vanished and before daylight came they were swearing to ride with Lawrence anywhere.

Now, Lawrence was as sincere as he ever had been in his life, and this speech struck out in an hour of need gives the clue to much of his strange history. His has been the romantic love of failure, of self-humiliation, of poverty. A habit of mind caught from the desert: though perhaps latent in his blood, of which the Spanish strain—and Spanish is half-Arab—shows in the severity of his jaw and the cruel flash of his rare and quickly appeased anger. And yet with all his love of failure Lawrence has been queerly dogged with success. As Miss Gertrude Bell said of him once, ‘Everything that he touches flowers.’ His forlorn hopes all come off, he casts his bread magnificently upon the waters and is peevish to find it again (much swollen) after many days. The more deeply he abases himself the higher he finds himself exalted. So hostile Fate revenges itself neatly by refusing to take his sacrifices; and provokes him to a philosophic bitterness which is hourly contradicted by his natural impulse towards gentleness and affection.

They called Abd el Kader and taking him aside among the thickets shouted into his ear that the Serahin were coming with the party and would be guided by him to the bridges near his home. He grunted that it was well, but Lawrence and All ibn el Hussein swore never again, if they survived, would they take a deaf man as a conspirator with them. Exhausted, they rested for an hour or so, but soon had to rise to review the Serahin. They looked wild and dashing, but blustered rather too much to be quite convincing. And they had no real leader; the chief’s lieutenant was more a politician than a soldier. However, they were better than nothing, so the increased party went forward to Azrak.

Azrak was a place of ancient legends; like Rumm and the vast ruins of Petra, most strangely haunted. It had been the home of ancient shepherd kings with musical names whose chivalrous memory lived in the Arab epics, and before that of a garrison of unhappy Roman legionaries. There was a great fort on a rock above rich meadows and palms and water-pools. Ali from the ridge that overlooked the place yelled out ‘Grass!’, leaped off his camel and flung himself down among the harsh green stems that were so exciting to him after the salt and stony desert. Then with his Harith war-cry he raced along the marsh, his skirts girded up and his feet splashing among the reeds.

Soon they noticed that Abd el Kader had vanished. They looked for him in the castle, among the palms, everywhere. At last they heard that he had ridden off northward not long after the start from the Serahin camp, making for the Druse mountains. The tribesmen had not known what the plans were, and, hating the man, had been glad to let him go without saying anything. But it was bad news. They must now give up the thought of destroying the middle bridges, and if Gadara was impossible because of the wood-cutters, the only bridge left for attack was Tell el Shehab. But Abd el Kader had certainly gone to the enemy with information of their plans and strength, and surely the Turks would trap them at the bridge. They took counsel with Fahad, who advised going on with the plan, trusting to the usual incompetence of the Turks. But the decision was not confidently taken.

AZRAK

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