Lawrence and the Arabs

by Robert Graves

XVIII

It fell on Lawrence then to be the leader, a task to which he was opposed on principle. He had from the first made a point of letting the Arabs run their own campaign as far as possible by themselves: he was merely their technical adviser and assistant. But he now constantly found himself forced into leadership, not only because of his obvious qualities as a desert fighter and outwitter of the Turks, but because of his freedom from tribal complications, his whole-hearted zeal for the Revolt, his disregard of loot and distinctions, his generosity and tact. Yet, again, he was a most unsuitable commander of a Bedouin raid. It meant his deciding such difficult questions as food-halts, pasturage, road-direction, pay, disputes, division of spoil, feuds and march-order. To be an efficient leader in this sense would mean a lifetime’s training. However, he managed that day without mishap and was rewarded at night by seeing the party sit down at only three camp-fires. Around one were Lawrence’s own men, including three Syrian peasants of the Hauran, from whom he intended to learn on the road such things as would be useful to him later when the Revolt was carried up to their country. At the second fire was Zaal with his twenty-five famous camel-riders. At the third were the other jealous clansmen from Rumm. Late at night, when hot bread and gazelle-meat had made tempers better, it was possible for Lawrence to gather all the chiefs together at his own neutral hearth to discuss the next day’s fighting. It was decided to water the next evening at a well in a covered valley two or three miles the near side of Mudowwara station; and from there go forward to see whether it could be taken with the few men that they had.

Next day, then, they reached the well, an open pool a few yards square. It looked uninviting. There was a green slime over the water with queer bladder-like islands on it, fatty-pink. The Arabs explained that the Turks had thrown dead camels into the well to make the water foul; but time had passed and the effect was wearing off. They filled their water-skins; it was all the drink that they could hope for unless they took Mudowwara. One of Zaal’s men slipped in by mistake and when he struggled out again, leaving a black hole in the green scum, the disturbed water stank horribly of old dead camel. At dusk Zaal, Lawrence, the sergeants and one or two more crept forward quietly to a Turkish trench-position on a ridge four or five hundred yards from the station. It was deserted. The station lay below with its lighted doors and windows, and its tent-camp. Zaal and Lawrence decided to creep nearer. They went on until they could hear the soldiers talking in the tents. A young, sickly-looking officer sauntered out towards them; they could see his features in the light of a match with which he lit a cigarette, and were ready to spring up and gag him; but he happened to turn back. At the ridge they held a whispered council of war. The garrison was perhaps two hundred men—Lawrence had counted the tents—but the station buildings seemed too solid for the Stokes shells, which were time-fused, not bursting on percussion; and the hundred and sixteen Arabs, though they had the advantage of surprise, could not yet be trusted to fight honourably together. So Lawrence voted against the attack, which was put off until a better day. They went away then, deciding at least to make sure of a train. Mudowwrara was not taken for another eleven months.

Some miles south of the station they found an ideal place for their mine and ambush. There was a low ridge of hills under cover of which they could ride quite close to the railway, and where the ridge ended was a curve such as Lawrence always chose for his mines because of the difficulty of replacing curved rails. This curve was within range of the ridge, which was fifty feet above the level of the rails; and a raised embankment across a hollow seemed exactly the right spot for the mine, for in the middle there was a two-arched bridge which allowed for the passage of flood-water in the rainy season. Whatever the effect of the mine might be on the engine, the bridge would certainly go and the coaches behind would be derailed. From behind the ridge, which was on the outside, not the inside of the curve, Lewis could sweep the lines in either direction and Stokes could use his trench-mortar unobserved. Lawrence was glad to have his two chief responsibilities posted where they had a safe retreat, especially as Stokes was weak with dysentery from the Mudowwara water, and Lewis unwell too.

The camels were hobbled out of sight and Feisal’s negro freedmen, who were in charge of the baggage-camels, carried their loads to the chosen place—the two Stokes guns with their shells, the two Lewis guns, the electric mine apparatus and the gelatine. Lawrence went to the bridge to dig a bed between the ends of two steel sleepers in which to bury his sandbag-full of gelatine, a fifty-pound shaking jelly. It took him two hours to do this properly because he had to remove the ballast which he had dug out, carrying it in a fold of his cloak, and dump it where it would not show. Also he had been forced to cross a sandbank and the tracks of his feet had to be covered. Then the two heavy wires, each two hundred yards long, had to be unrolled, connected with the charge and carried over the ridge where the exploder was to be put under cover. The wires were stiff and would not lie flat unless weighed down with stones, and it took three hours more to hide the marks made in burying them. Lawrence finally finished off the job with a pair of bellows and long brushings of his cloak to imitate a smooth wind-swept surface. It was well done; nobody could see where the mine was, or how the wires ran. The man who fired the exploder, however, being out of sight of the bridge, had to be given the signal from a point fifty yards ahead of him; so Lawrence decided to give the signal rather than work the exploder himself. Feisal’s favourite freedman Salem was given that honour and was taught on the disconnected exploder to bang down the handle exactly as Lawrence raised his hand for an imaginary engine on the bridge. Meanwhile the rest of the men, who had been left with the camels, had got tired of the valley and were perched upon the skyline with the sunset flaming behind them (the ambush was west of the line), in full view of a small Turkish hill-post four miles to the south and also of Mudowwara somewhat farther to the north. Lawrence and Zaal threw them off the ridge, but it was too late; the Turks had seen them and began to let off rifles at the lengthening shadows for fear of a surprise attack. However, Lawrence hoped that the Turks might think them gone if the place looked deserted in the morning; so they stayed in the valley, baked bread and settled down comfortably for the night. The party was now united and, ashamed of their folly on the skyline, the jealous Howeitat tribesmen chose Zaal for their leader.

The next day, the nineteenth of September, Zaal and his cousin Howeimil managed with difficulty to keep the fidgeting Arabs in the hollow, but perhaps after all the Turks saw something, for at nine o’clock a party of forty men came out from the southern post, advancing in open order. If they were left alone they would discover the ambush in an hour’s time; if they were opposed the railway would be alarmed and traffic held up. The only thing to do was to send a small party to snipe at them and, if possible, draw them away in pursuit behind another ridge of hills out of sight. This would hide the main position and reassure the Turks as to the size and intention of the force they had seen. The trick worked well; they could hear by the shots gradually sounding fainter in the distance that the Turks were being drawn off.

An ordinary patrol of eight men and a stout corporal then came up the line from the south in search of mines or obstructions. Lawrence could see the corporal mopping his forehead, for it was now eleven o’clock and really hot. They walked over the mine without noticing anything, but a mile or two farther on halted under a culvert, lay down, drank from their water-bottles and at last went to sleep. It seemed that the Turks were quite satisfied that the ridge was deserted, but about noon Lawrence through his field-glasses saw a force of about a hundred soldiers coming up towards them from Mudowwara, about six or seven miles away. They were marching very slowly and no doubt unwillingly at the thought of losing their accustomed midday sleep, but it could not be more than two hours before they arrived. Lawrence decided to pack up and move off, trusting to luck that the mine would not be noticed and that he might come back later and try again. They sent a messenger south to their drawing-off party to arrange a meeting-place behind some rocks a mile or two away. But a minute later the watchman reported smoke from the south. There was evidently a train in the next station and, as they watched, it came puffing out towards them. A wild scramble followed as the Arabs got into position behind the ridge. Stokes and Lewis forgot their dysentery and raced to their guns.

The train rushed on at full speed and Lawrence saw that there were two engines in front, not one, which rather upset his calculations: but he decided to fire the mine under the second. If he mined the first, the second might uncouple and steam away with the wagons. He was glad that it was not an automatic mine. The Arabs with their rifles were only a hundred and fifty yards from the bridge, and the Stokes and Lewis guns three hundred; the exploder was in between, on the same ridge. On came the train at full speed and opened random fire into the desert where the Arabs had been reported. The firing sounded heavy and Lawrence wondered if his eighty men were enough for the battle. There were ten coaches with rifle-muzzles crowded at the windows and sandbag nests on the roofs, filled with sharpshooters. The whistles screamed round the curve, and Salem was dancing round the exploder on his knees, calling on God to make him fruitful. As the front wheels touched the bridge Lawrence raised his hand in the signal to Salem.

There was a terrific roar and the line vanished behind a column of black dust and smoke a hundred feet high and wide, while fragments of steel and iron struck clanging all about. An engine-wheel went whirling over the ridge and fell heavily in the desert behind. There followed a deathly silence. Lawrence ran to join the sergeants while Salem picked up a rifle and charged into the smoke. As Lawrence ran he heard shots, and the Bedouin could be seen leaping forward towards the track. The train was stationary and the Turks were tumbling out of the doors on the other side to shelter behind the railway embankment beyond. Then the Lewis gun opened fire straight down the train, and the long row of Turks on the roofs was swept off by the furious spray of bullets. When Lawrence reached Stokes and Lewis, the Turks behind the eleven-foot high embankment, in the middle of which the bridge had been, were firing point-blank at the Arabs between the wheels of the train. The Lewis gun could not reach them, protected by the train and by the curve of the embankment, but the Stokes mortar could. Its second shell dropped among them in the hollow and made a shambles of the place. The survivors ran in a panic across the desert, throwing away their rifles and equipment. This was the turn of Lewis again, who, with his assistant, a Sherari boy, mowed down the Turks as they ran. That ended the battle. The Sherari dropped the Lewis gun and rushed down to join the others in the plundering. The whole affair had taken ten minutes. Lawrence looked north and saw the hundred men from Mudowwara breaking back uncertainly to the railway to meet the train-fugitives running up the line. He looked south and saw the other thirty Arabs racing each other to share in the spoil. The Turks with whom they had been fighting, were coming slowly after them firing volleys. Evidently the plunderers would be safe for half an hour more.

Lawrence ran down from the ridge to see what effect the mine had had. The bridge was gone and into the gap had fallen the front wagon, which had been filled with sick. The smash had killed all but three or four and rolled dead and dying in a bleeding heap at one end. One of those still alive called out the word ‘typhus’ in delirium. So Lawrence wedged the door shut, and left them until their friends should come. He was feeling pretty sick. The wagons following were derailed and smashed; the frames of some were buckled beyond repair. The second engine was a blanched pile of smoking iron. The first engine had come off better; though it was derailed and lying half over with the cab smashed, its driving gear was intact and the steam still at pressure. The destruction of locomotives was the chief object of the campaign against the railway, so Lawrence had kept a box of gun-cotton with fuse and detonator ready for this very emergency. He put it on the cylinder, lit the fuse and drove the plunderers back a little way. In half a minute the charge burst, destroying the cylinder and the axle too. The engine would not run again.

The Arabs had gone raving mad. They were running about at top speed, bareheaded, half-naked, screaming, shooting in the air, clawing at each other, as they burst open trucks and staggered off with immense bales which they ripped open by the side of the railway, smashing what they did not want. The train had been packed with refugees, sick men, volunteers for boat-service on the Euphrates, and families of Turkish officers returning to Damascus. To one side of the wreck stood thirty or forty hysterical women, unveiled, tearing their clothes and hair, shrieking together. The Arabs paid no attention to them, busy looting their absolute fill for the first time in their lives. Never was such a litter of household goods—carpets, mattresses, blankets, clothes for men and women, clocks, cooking-pots, food, ornaments and weapons. Camels became common property: each man loaded the nearest with what it would carry and shooed it westward into the desert while he turned to his next fancy. The women, seeing Lawrence unemployed, rushed and caught at him, howling for mercy. He comforted them that there was no danger, but they would not let him go until they were knocked away by their husbands, who in turn grovelled at Lawrence’s feet in an agony of terror, pleading for their lives. He kicked them off with his bare feet and broke free. Next a group of Austrian officers and non-commissioned officers, artillery instructors to the Turks, quietly appealed to him in Turkish for quarter: he answered in German. Then one of them, mortally wounded, asked in English for a doctor. There was none, but Lawrence said that the Turks would soon be there to care for him. The man was dead before that, and so were most of the others, for a dispute broke out between them and the Arabs; an Austrian foolishly fired at one of Lawrence’s Syrians, and before Lawrence could interfere all but two or three were cut down.

Among the passengers were five Egyptian soldiers captured by the Turks in a night-raid of Davenport’s two hundred miles down the line. They knew Lawrence and told him of Davenport’s efforts in Abdulla’s sector where he was constantly pegging away without much encouragement from the Arabs and forced to rely mostly on imported Egyptians like these. Lawrence set the five to march off the prisoners to the appointed rallying-place behind the hills westward. Lewis and Stokes had come down to help Lawrence, who was a little anxious about them. The Arabs in their madness were as ready to attack friend as enemy. Three times Lawrence had to defend himself when they pretended not to know him and snatched at his things. Lewis went across the railway to count the thirty men he had killed and to find Turkish gold and trophies in their haversacks. Stokes went into the hollow behind the embankment, where he saw the effect of his second shell and turned back hurriedly. One of Lawrence’s Syrians came up with his arms full of booty and shouted to Lawrence that an old woman in the last wagon but one wished to see him. Lawrence told the man to put down the booty and go at once for Ghazala and some baggage-camels to remove the guns; for the Turks were coming close and the Arabs were escaping one by one towards the hills, driving their staggering camels before them. Lawrence was annoyed with himself for not having thought of moving the guns earlier. Meanwhile he went to the last wagon but one, found a trembling old invalid, the Lady Ayesha by name, a friend and hostess of Feisal’s, who wanted to know what was happening. Lawrence reassured her that no harm would come to her and found the old negress, her servant, whom he sent to bring a drink from the leaking tender of the first engine. The grateful Lady Ayesha later sent him secretly from Damascus a charming letter and a little Baluchi carpet as a remembrance of their odd meeting. Later still—as I hear from an indirect but trustworthy source—Lawrence, who made it his principle to get no spoils of any sort from the War, sent the carpet with an equally charming letter to Lady Allenby, who now has it in her bedroom.

The Syrian never brought the camels. All of Lawrence’s servants, overcome with greed, had escaped with the Bedouin. No one was now left but the three Englishmen. They began to fear that they must abandon the guns and run for their lives, but just then saw two camels cantering back. It was Zaal and Howeimil, who had missed Lawrence and returned to find him. Lawrence and the sergeants were rolling up the cable, their only piece. Zaal dismounted and told Lawrence to climb up, but he loaded the camel with the wire and exploder instead; Zaal laughed at the quaint booty. Howeimil was lame from an old wound on the knee and could not walk, but couched his camel while the Lewis guns were hoisted across behind him, tied butt to butt and looking like scissors. There remained the mortars, but Stokes appeared unskilfully leading a stray baggage-camel which he had caught. Stokes was too weak to run, so he was given Zaal’s camel with the mining apparatus; the trench-mortars were put on the baggage-camel, and Howeimil went off in charge of them. Meanwhile Lawrence, Lewis and Zaal, in a sheltered hollow behind the old gun-position, made a fire of cartridge-boxes, petrol and wreckage, banked the Lewis-gun drums and spare rifle ammunition round it, and gingerly laid some Stokes shells on top. Then they ran. As the flames reached the cordite and ammonal there was a colossal burst of fire, thousands of cartridges exploded in series like machine-guns, and the shells roared off in columns of dust and smoke. Both parties of Turks were impressed by this noise, and decided that the Arabs were posted strongly. They halted and began to send out flanking parties according to rule. Through the gap between the main body of the northern party and their flankers working round on the western side, the three men ran panting away into concealment among the farther ridges.

At the rallying-place Lawrence found his missing camels and the Syrian servants with them. In his soft deadly voice he told the Syrians what he thought of them for their desertion. They pleaded that camels had become common property and that someone else had gone off with the right ones. But this did not excuse them for having found others for themselves and loaded them up with plunder. Lawrence asked if anyone was hurt and was told that a boy had been killed in the first Arab rush; three others were slightly wounded. The rush had not been ordered and was a mistake; the Lewis and Stokes guns could have managed the killing without Arab help, and Lawrence felt that he was not responsible for the boy’s death. Then one of Feisal’s freedmen said that Salem was missing, and others that he had been last seen lying wounded just beyond the engine. Lawrence had not been told and was angry, for Salem was under his charge. For the second time he had been put by Arab carelessness in the position of leaving a friend behind. He called for volunteers to rescue the negro. Zaal and twelve of his men said that they would try, but when they came near the train they saw that they were too late. A hundred and fifty Turks were swarming over the wreck and by now Salem would be dead, and not only dead but tortured and mutilated as the Turkish habit was. (The Arabs made a practice now of mercifully killing their own badly wounded to prevent them falling alive into Turkish hands.)

They had to go back without Salem, but took the opportunity of recovering some of the baggage, including the sergeants’ kits, which had been left at the camping-ground. The Turks caught them at this and opened fire with a machine-gun. Others ran to cut them off. Zaal, a dead shot, stopped with five others at a ridge-top and fired back, calling to the remainder of the party to escape while he held the Turks up. So they retired from ridge to ridge, hitting at least thirteen or fourteen Turks at the cost of four of their camels wounded. The Turks gave up the pursuit.

Victory always undid an Arab force: this was now no longer a raiding party but a stumbling baggage-caravan loaded to breaking-point with enough household goods to make an Arab tribe rich for years. Of the ninety prisoners, ten were friendly Arab women on the way to Damascus from Medina who had now decided to go instead to Mecca by way of Akaba. These and thirty-four wounded Turks were mounted in pairs on the spare camels that had been used for carrying the explosives and ammunition. The sergeants asked Lawrence to give them a sword each as a souvenir; and he was going down the column to look for something for them when suddenly he met Feisal’s freedmen and to his astonishment saw, strapped on the crupper behind one of them, the missing Salem. He was unconscious and soaked with blood from a wound through his back near the spine. Apparently he had been hit in his rush downhill and left for dead near the engine; where the tribesmen stripped him of his cloak, dagger, rifle, and head-gear. One of his fellows had found him alive and carried him off home without, as he should have done, telling Lawrence. Salem soon recovered but ever afterwards bore Lawrence an undeserved grudge for abandoning him when wounded and under his charge.

They had to water again at the evil-smelling well—the prisoners had drunk all their water—and its nearness to Mudowwara made this dangerous. However, they made what haste they could and found it unoccupied. So back safely to Rumm by the same long avenue; in the dark this time, which made the cliffs more terrifying still, for they were invisible except as a jagged skyline high overhead on either side. From Rumm to Akaba, entering in glory laden with spoil, and boasting that the trains were now at their mercy. The two sergeants hurriedly returned to Egypt, having had the adventure they wanted. They had won a battle single-handed, had dysentery, lived on camel-milk, learned to ride a camel fifty miles a day without pain. They were awarded medals by Allenby.

The success excited the camp at Akaba. Everybody wanted to try this new and profitable sport of train-mining. The French captain of the Algerian company of gunners at Akaba, by name Pisani, was the first volunteer, an active and ambitious officer on the look-out for decorations. Feisal provided three young noblemen of Damascus who were eager to lead tribal raids, and on the twenty-sixth of September the party rode to Rumm in search of tribesmen volunteers. Lawrence said that the next raid was especially intended for Gasim’s clan. This was heaping coals of fire on the adversary’s head, but the adversary was too greedy to refuse the chance. The difficulty indeed was to keep down the numbers. They took a hundred and fifty men and a huge train of baggage-camels for the spoils.

This time they worked in the direction of Maan, riding over the Syrian border into the high hills by Batra where the keen air of the northern desert came blowing at them through a pass at the top. From Batra they turned west and struck the railway, marching along it until they came to a convenient bridge in an embankment, as at Mudowwara. Here, between midnight and dawn, they buried an automatic mine of a new and wonderful lyddite type. They lay in ambush a thousand yards away among the wormwood thickets, but no train came that day or the following night. Lawrence found the waiting intolerable. The Arabs paid no attention to the leaders appointed by Feisal and would listen to no one but Lawrence, whose success was now beginning to have results very unwelcome to him. He was asked to act as judge and had to consent. With Feisal’s example and his own pre-war experience at Carchemish to help him out, he settled during that six days’ ride twelve cases of armed assault, four camel-thefts, a marriage, two ordinary thefts, a divorce, fourteen feuds, two cases of evil eye and a bewitchment.

The evil eyes he cured by staring at their possessors with his own for ten minutes (‘horrible blue eyes,’ as an old Arab woman once told him, ‘like bits of sky through the eye-holes of a skull’), the bewitchment by casting a mock-spell of his own over the wizard. Then he began to realize what he was doing—probably Pisani’s presence reminded him that he was only an Englishman playing at being an Arab. He went off on a long train of shameful thought about himself and the fraud that he was playing on the Arabs. Again Pisani’s presence reminded him that he was leading them into this war of freedom knowing well enough that the chances were heavily against their being allowed to keep the freedom if ever they won it. The agony of his mind’s conflict at Nebk returned to him in double force. The stings of a scorpion on his left hand kept him awake that night with an arm so swollen that at least he was distracted by the pain from further thinking, but by next morning his position began troubling him again, and he decided to renounce his leadership. He called up the sheikhs to tell them of his decision. But at that moment a train was reported, and as always happened with Lawrence, who was another Hamlet, sudden enforced action cleared away his philosophic doubts and hesitations. He jumped up to watch the success of the mine.

However, the train with its cargo of water-tanks passed over without accident. The Arabs, who wanted something better than water, thanked him as if he had intended this failure. He had then to go down to lay an electric mine over the other; the electric mine would set the first one off. The Turks did not catch him at work, for it was their hour of midday sleep. There were three bridges in the embankment and the southern one had been chosen for the ambush. Under the arch of the middle bridge Lawrence hid the exploder. The Lewis guns were put under the northern one to rake the far side of the train when the mine went off. On the near side was a convenient cross-channel in the valley, three hundred yards from the railway, where the Arabs could line up behind the wormwood bushes. No train came that day; enemy patrols went constantly up and down the rails, but without finding the mine. The next morning, the sixth of October, a train came out of Maan, but ahead of the train a patrol was walking, and there was an anxious wait to see which arrived first. If the patrol won the race it would give warning to the train; however, Lawrence calculated that it would be beaten by two or three hundred yards, so the Arabs took up their position. The train came on panting up the gradient. It was a heavy train with twelve loaded wagons.

Lawrence sat by a bush where he could see the mine, a hundred yards away, and the exploder and the Lewis guns. He gave the signal when the engine was exactly over the arch and the history of Mudowwara was repeated. There was the same roar and cloud, but a green one this time, because lyddite was being used instead of gelatine, and then the Lewis gun rattled and the Arabs charged. Lawrence smiled sourly to see Pisani running excitedly at their head singing the Marseillaise, as if this was a battle for French freedom. A Turk on the buffers of the fourth wagon from the end uncoupled the tail of the train and let it slip downhill. Lawrence ran to stop it by putting a stone underneath a wheel, but was amused at the trucks sliding off on their own to safety; his effort was half-hearted. And he had reached a point of such carelessness about his own safety that he only laughed at a Turkish colonel in the runaway wagons who fired point-blank at him from a window with his pistol. The Western military idea of trying to end the War by reducing the enemy’s man-power seemed comic in the desert. And the bullet only grazed his hip.

The train had been derailed, the engine ruined and the tender and front wagon telescoped. Twenty Turks were killed, the others taken prisoners, including four officers who stood in tears begging for their lives, which, however, the Arabs never intended to take. The wagons contained seventy tons of food-stuffs urgently needed down the line, as they learned from the captured way-bill. For a joke Lawrence receipted this and left it in the van, sending the duplicate to Feisal as detailed report of the success. What could not be taken was destroyed under the direction of Pisani. As before, the Arabs became merely camel-drivers, walking behind a long string of loaded animals. This time Lawrence was not deserted; Farraj held the camel, while Sheikh Salem (Gasim’s brother) and another of the leading Arabs helped with the exploder and the heavy wire. But rescue parties of the Turks were four hundred yards away by the time they got off. There were no Arabs killed or wounded.

Lawrence’s pupils afterwards practised the art of mining by themselves and rumours of their success spread through the tribes, not always intelligently. The Beni Atiyeh tribe wrote to Feisal: ‘Send us a lurens and we will blow up trains with it.’ Feisal sent them one of the Ageyl who helped them to ambush a most important train. On board were the Turkish colonel who had left his garrison in the lurch at Wejh, twenty thousand pounds in gold, and precious trophies. The Ageyl repeated history by only saving the wire and exploder for his share. During the next four months seventeen engines were destroyed and much plunder taken. Travelling became a great terror for the Turks. People paid extra for the back seats in trains. The engine-drivers went on strike. Civilian traffic nearly ceased. The threat was extended to Aleppo merely by having a notice posted in Damascus to say that all good Arabs would henceforward travel on the Syrian railway at their own risk. The Turks felt the loss severely; not only could they not any longer think of marching out of Medina, but they were short of engines in Palestine too, just when Allenby’s threat began to trouble them.

DEMOLITIONS ON THE RAILWAY

Copyright

Meanwhile, in the middle of September, Allenby calling Lawrence to Egypt asked him what exactly his aims were. Was this blowing up of the railway more than a melodramatic advertisement for Feisal’s cause? Lawrence explained his policy, unchanged since he framed it in Abdulla’s camp six months before. He was hoping to keep the line to Medina working, but only just working: the garrison was helpless to do the Arabs harm and cost less to feed than it would in a prisoners’ camp in Egypt if it surrendered. And while the mining was going on, the Arab regulars were being properly trained for a move into Syria. Allenby asked about the pass to Akaba north of Aba el Lissan where he knew from spies that the Turks intended a big attack. Lawrence explained that he and the Arabs had been working for months to provoke the Turks to come forward, and at last were about to be rewarded. The Turks had been hesitating because they had no idea of the strength of the Arabs, who being mostly irregulars went about in parties, not in stiff formation; so that neither aeroplanes nor spies could count them. On the other hand, Lawrence and Feisal always knew exactly what the Turkish forces were because they were regular troops and the Arab intelligence service was excellent. So the Arabs could always decide in time whether to fight or avoid fight.

Allenby understood then. And when at last the big attack was made from Maan on Akaba by way of the northern pass, Maulud with his regulars let the Turks into a trap from which few of them escaped. They never made another attempt on Akaba.