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.
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 4th, 1918. 4th 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.
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.