XVI
Akaba was in ruins. Repeated bombardments by French and British warships had knocked the little town to pieces. To the Arabs it seemed hardly worth while taking at the cost of so much blood and pain and hunger. And hunger was still with them. They now had seven hundred Turkish prisoners to feed in addition to their original five hundred men and two thousand allies, no money (or any market to buy food in); and the last meal had been two days before. All that they had to eat was riding-camels, a most expensive form of food and a poor one. And dates. But this was July and the dates were still green. Raw, they tasted very nasty, and cooking made them no better. The only alternative to constant hunger was violent pains. The forty-two officer-prisoners were an intolerable nuisance. The colonel of the Turkish battalion at Aba el Lissan had been a difficulty ever since his capture, when Nasir had only just saved him from the fury of the tribesmen: the silly man was trying to restore the battle with a little pocket-pistol. Later he had grumbled at being given a quarter loaf of brown Turkish ration bread. Farraj and Daud had looted it for their master Lawrence, who divided it up among the four of them. The colonel asked was it a fit breakfast for a Turkish officer. Lawrence answered, certainly it was (he himself a British staff-officer had eaten his with relish), and he must expect to make it do for lunch and dinner as well and probably for to-morrow’s breakfast, lunch and dinner too. The Turk also complained that one of the Arabs had insulted him with an obscene Turkish word: Lawrence answered that the man must have learned it from one of his Turkish masters and was rendering to Cæsar the things that were Cæsar’s. At Akaba it was worse still: the officer-prisoners were disgusted when they found how unprovided their captors were: they thought it was only a fraud to annoy them and would not believe that Lawrence and Nasir had not all the delicacies of Cairo hidden somewhere in their saddle-bags.
AKABA
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In the evening, the first reaction after success having passed off, they thought of defence. Auda went back to Guweira and three other defensive posts were set in a semi-circle about Akaba. Lawrence decided to go to Egypt at once with the great news and ask for food, money and arms to be sent at once by sea as reward. He chose eight men to go with him, mostly Howeitat, on the best camels of the force. A bad ride was ahead of them, and it was difficult to decide whether to go gently, sparing the animals, in which case they might fail with hunger; or whether to ride hard, when they might break down with exhaustion or sore feet in mid-desert. Lawrence decided in the end to keep at a walk; if they could hold out, they would reach Suez in fifty hours. But in such cases the test of endurance is harder for the man than for the camel, and Lawrence was near the end of his strength, having ridden an average of fifty miles a day for the last month, with very little food. To make halts for cooking unnecessary they carried lumps of boiled camel and cooked dates in a rag behind their saddles.
The camels were trembling for weariness early in the night, for the road wound up across the Sinai hills with a gradient of one in three and a half. When they reached the top one camel had to be sent back as unfit for further travel. The others were allowed to graze for an hour. About midnight they reached Themed, the only wells on the journey, watered the camels and drank themselves but did not stay many minutes. They rode all that night and when the sun rose gave the camels half an hour’s grazing, then on again all day until sunset, when they halted for an hour. They rode all that second night at a mechanical walk, over hills, and when dawn came saw a melon-field sown in this no-man’s-land between the armies by some adventurous Arab. They halted for an hour and cracked the unripe melons to cool their mouths, then again forward until Suez came in sight, or something that probably was Suez, a jumble of points bobbing about far away in the mirage. They reached great trench lines with forts and barbed wire, roads and railways; but they were all deserted and falling into decay; the war had long since moved on a hundred and fifty miles to the north-east. At last in the middle of the afternoon of the third day they arrived at the Suez Canal. They had ridden for forty-nine hours without sleep and with only four short halts and had come a hundred and sixty-eight miles. When it is remembered that they were tired men before they started, and that the camels were exhausted too, this must rank as a good ride, though Lawrence surpassed it himself later.
He found himself still on the wrong side of the Canal, and the garrison-post that he had aimed for was deserted—he did not know why, but learned later that there had been an outbreak of plague, so the troops were out camping in the uninfected desert. He found a telephone in a deserted hut and called up the Canal Headquarters. He was told that they were sorry but they couldn’t take him across; there were no free boats; but next morning for sure they would send across and take him to the Quarantine Department (for he was now technically infectious). He tried again, explaining that he had urgent messages for Headquarters at Cairo, but he was rung off. Fortunately the telephone-exchange operator told him with friendly oaths that it was no use talking to the Canal people, and put him through to a Major, the Embarkation officer at Suez. He was an old friend of the Revolt, who would catch Red Sea warships as they entered the harbour and make them unwillingly pile their decks with stores for Wejh or Yenbo. The Major understood at once the urgency of the matter and sent his own launch from the harbour to take Lawrence across, making him swear not to tell the Canal authorities, until after the war, of this invasion of their sacred waters. The men and camels were sent up the Canal for ten miles to a rest-camp for animals; he arranged rations for them there by telephone.
At Suez where he arrived verminous and filthy, with his clothes sticking to his saddle-sores, he went to a hotel and had six iced drinks, a good dinner, a hot bath, and a comfortable bed. He appreciated this dull hotel-comfort after having in the last four desperate weeks, though not yet recovered from a severe illness, ridden fourteen hundred miles on camel-back through hostile country. They were weeks of little sleep, poor food, frequent fighting and never-ceasing anxiety at the hottest time of the year in one of the hottest countries of the world. Later he found that he weighed only seven stone, nine stone being his normal weight; though in his first year at the University he had carried eleven without being out of condition.
He went to Cairo by train on a permit-ticket given him by the Embarkation officer. A mixed party of Egyptian and British military police on the train was most suspicious of him. When he said that he was in the uniform of a staff-officer of the Sherif of Mecca they could not believe it. They looked at his bare feet, white silk robes, gold head-rope and dagger. ‘What army, sir?’ asked the sergeant. ‘The Meccan army,’ Lawrence answered. ‘Never heard of it, don’t know the uniform,’ the sergeant said. ‘Well,’ said Lawrence, ‘would you recognize the uniform of a Montenegrin dragoon?’ This beat the sergeant. Any Allied troops in uniform might travel without permits, and the police, though expected to recognize all the uniforms of every army, were not even sure who all the Allies were. Mecca might be the name of some new country that had joined in without their knowledge. They wired up the line and a perspiring intelligence-officer boarded the train near Ismailia to check the statements of this possible spy; he was very angry to find that he had been sent on a fool’s errand.
At Ismailia all changed and waited on the platform for the Port Said-Cairo express. Another train had also just arrived and from it stepped a tall determined-looking general in company with Admiral Wemyss, the Naval Commander-in-Chief, and two or three important staff-officers. They marched up and down the platform deep in talk. After awhile Lawrence caught the eye of a naval captain, who came over and spoke to him, wondering who he was. When the captain heard of the surprise capture of Akaba he was properly excited, promising to have a relief-ship sent there at once loaded with all the spare food in Suez. He would make immediate arrangements on his own responsibility so as not to disturb General Allenby. ‘Allenby? what’s he doing here?’ asked Lawrence. ‘Oh, he’s Commander-in-Chief now.’ This was most important news. Allenby’s predecessor, who at first had been against the Revolt, had gradually been brought to realize its value to him, and in his last dispatches to London had written in praise of the Arabs and particularly of Feisal. But after the second battle of Gaza, which had been forced on him by orders from London against his better judgment and ended in defeat, he had been recalled. Lawrence wondered whether he would have to spend months training Allenby in the same way to realize the importance of the Arabs. Allenby had been commanding divisions in France since the outbreak of war and was full of Western Front notions of gun-power and masses of men wearing down the enemy by sheer slaughter, ideas which did not apply at all well to war in the East. But he was a cavalry man and ready perhaps to go back to the old-fashioned idea of a war of movement and manœuvre.
Later at Cairo he sent for Lawrence, having got his report about Akaba. It was a comic interview. Lawrence was still in his Arab clothes, because when he went to the hotel to look out his old army uniform he found that insects had been at it. Allenby sat in his chair looking at Lawrence, very much puzzled at this haggard little man, with silk robes and a face burned brick red with the sun, explaining with a map a fantastic plan for raising the Eastern Syrians in revolt behind the enemy lines. He listened quietly, asking few questions and trying to make up his mind how far Lawrence was a charlatan and how far a real performer—a doubt that was also constantly in Lawrence’s own mind. He asked what help he wanted. Lawrence said, stores and arms and a fund of two hundred thousand pounds in gold to convince and control his converts. Allenby put up his chin at last, a well-known decisive gesture and said, ‘Well, I will do for you what I can.’ And meant it. The meeting of Lawrence with Feisal had begun a new successful phase of the war in Arabia, the meeting of Lawrence with Allenby began an even more successful one.
Hitherto Lawrence had sent few and misleading reports to Egypt—even these were, I am told, often doctored by the Staff on the way to the Commander-in-Chief—because he could not be sure how acceptable the truth would be, or how well his secrets would be kept; he had not, for instance, warned the Commander-in-Chief of his intended capture of Akaba. But he learned to take Allenby more deeply into his confidence and never afterwards regretted it. There was little personal intimacy between the two then or afterwards—they have not met since 1921—but great trust and liking. Allenby is an extremely practical man and a first-class soldier: spiritual conflicts or philosophic doubts do not appear to touch him and it is impossible to imagine him living among Bedouin or doing any of the crazy things that were Lawrence’s daily life. Lawrence’s methods and motives were a mystery and remained a mystery to him, but he gratefully accepted him as a fact and let the rest go by. Lawrence was simply to him, as he told me recently, a first-class irregular leader and exactly the man he wanted for the protection of the floating right flank of his army. I asked whether in his opinion Lawrence would have made a good general of regular forces too. ‘A very bad general,’ said Allenby, ‘but a good Commander-in-Chief, yes. There is no show that I would believe him incapable of running if he wanted to, but he would have to be given a free hand.’ I also asked Lawrence his opinion of Allenby. ‘A great man,’ said Lawrence. ‘For instance?’ I asked. ‘For instance, when a Major-General of the Royal Army Medical Corps, the surgeon-in-chief of Allenby’s army, had to go, he chose to replace him with the Medical Officer of a Territorial unit, a mere lieutenant-colonel. And surely a man who can persuade armoured cars, cavalry, infantry, camel-corps, aeroplanes, warships and Bedouin irregulars to combine in a single military operation is a great man, isn’t he?’ When recently Lawrence published his book the one favourable opinion that he was really anxious to get was Allenby’s, for the Field-Marshal is as strict on points of style—he loves Milton’s Comus—as upon historical accuracy. Allenby approved both its style and accuracy; which satisfies Lawrence completely.
Meanwhile sixteen thousand pounds in English sovereigns were drawn from a Cairo bank to be sent to Nasir at once to enable him to pay his debts. It was important to redeem the notes that he had given out, which were army telegraph-forms pencilled with promises to pay gold at Akaba. The money went to Suez to join the flour that was being quickly loaded there, ready to be rushed to famished Akaba. These were the first things that mattered. After this the changed aspect of the war in Arabia had to be discussed with the Arab Bureau.
Lawrence began talking with authority. His capture of Akaba made him a person of very much greater importance than before and had given him confidence in himself. He told his seniors that the big operations about the railway near Medina were a mistake. The war had moved north now. He suggested that the base at Wejh should be closed down, as Yenbo had been closed before, and that the whole of Feisal’s army should move up north and make its base at Akaba. Akaba was on Allenby’s right flank, only a hundred miles from his centre, but eight hundred miles from Mecca. Once there at Akaba, it was logical that Feisal should no longer be tied to his father at Mecca, the nominal Commander-in-Chief of the Arabs, but should be made an army-corps commander under direct control of Allenby. Lawrence had talked this over with Feisal long before in Wejh and Feisal had been ready to accept. The High Commissioner of Egypt who hitherto had been the chief British partner did not mind the transference being made; though Feisal’s removal would weaken the forces in Arabia. Abdulla, Ali and Zeid were strong enough to keep the Turks in Medina from making another attempt on Mecca. There was only one difficulty and that was Feisal’s father, the Sherif. Would he make any difficulty? Fortunately Colonel Wilson, the High Commissioner’s representative at Jiddah, talked him over, and Feisal decided to move up to Akaba at once. He sent his camel-corps up the coast and the remainder of the army under Jaafar was transported by a warship. More stores and ammunition were sent to Akaba, and British officers to distribute it properly at Feisal’s orders.
Lawrence was at Jiddah with Wilson when two startling telegrams arrived from the intelligence service in Egypt. The first reported that the Howeitat at Akaba were carrying on a treacherous correspondence with the Turks at Maan, the next that Auda was connected with the plot. This was alarming, for though Lawrence could not believe it of Auda, Mohammed el Dheilan was quite capable of double play, and the old fox who had captured Guweira was still less to be trusted. Three days later Lawrence arrived by warship at Akaba, where Nasir had no notion of anything wrong. He only told Nasir that he wished to greet Auda, and asked for a swift camel and a guide. At dawn he arrived at Guweira and found Auda, Mohammed and Zaal in a tent together. They were confused at his sudden appearance but said that all was well and they ate together as friends. Other Howeitat chiefs came in and Lawrence distributed the Sherif’s presents, telling them among other things that Nasir had at last got his month’s leave to Mecca. The Sherif was enthusiastic for the Revolt and would not allow his officers leave from the front. Poor Nasir’s banishment from his family had been a stock joke and it was said that he would certainly deserve a holiday when Akaba fell; but Nasir had not believed that it would be granted until he was handed Hussein’s letter the day before. In gratitude Nasir sold Lawrence a famous pedigree camel, Ghazala, as the owner of which he had great honour among the Howeitat.
After lunch Lawrence took Auda and Mohammed for a walk and mentioned their correspondence with the Turks. Auda began to laugh, Mohammed looked disgusted. Then they explained, telling a farcical story of how Mohammed had wanted to get money from the Turks by a confidence trick and had therefore taken Auda’s seal and written to the Governor of Maan offering to desert to the Turks if he were given money. A large sum was gladly sent on account, but Auda had waylaid the messenger, taken the spoils and was now denying Mohammed his share. Lawrence laughed with them over the story but knew that more lay behind it; the fact was, they had been angry that no guns or troops had yet arrived since Akaba had been taken a month before, and that no rewards had been given them for their part in it. Auda, feeling sorry for the Turks whom he had beaten so badly, was quite ready to fight on their side for a change: it was generosity rather than treachery with him. But both Auda and Mohammed were surprised at Lawrence’s knowledge, wanting to know how he came by it and how much more he knew. He laughed at them, quoting, as if they were his own words, actual phrases of the letters that had been exchanged, and made them feel uncomfortable. Then he told them casually that Feisal’s entire army was coming up, and that Allenby was sending rifles, guns, high-explosive, food and money. Finally he added that Auda’s present expenses in hospitality must be great; would it help if something were advanced of the great gift that Feisal was bringing up to him? Auda agreed cheerfully to accept the advance and with it to keep the Howeitat well fed and cheerful. So Lawrence went back to Akaba, took ship back to Egypt and reported that there was no treachery at Guweira: everything was going on well there. But he did not explain the whole story; Headquarters would not have understood it.