Lawrence and the Arabs

by Robert Graves

XXV

At Akaba preparations for the grand expedition of all arms to cut the railways at Deraa were complete—so complete that Dawnay and Joyce were both for the moment on holiday. Lawrence was glad to be there to cope with a most unexpected and absurd situation. The Sherif, Hussein, had issued a Royal Gazette from Mecca with a proclamation to the effect that fools were calling Jaafar Pasha the General Officer Commanding the Arab Northern Army, whereas there was no such rank, indeed no rank higher than captain in the Arab Army, in which Sheikh Jaafar, like many another, was doing his duty. Hussein had heard of Jaafar’s C.M.G. and had published this proclamation in jealousy without warning Feisal. He intended by it to spite the Syrian and Mesopotamian Arabs in Feisal’s army. They were fighting, he knew, to free their own countries for self-government, but he was aiming at a regular Arab Empire which he was ambitious to rule from Mecca, with the spiritual leadership of the Mohammedan world thrown in. Jaafar and all the Arab officers at once resigned. Feisal refused the resignations, pointing out that their commissions as officers were issued by himself and he alone was disgraced by the proclamation. He telegraphed to Mecca resigning command. Hussein appointed Zeid in his place. Zeid promptly refused to take command. Hussein sent threatening messages by cable and all military life was at an end from Akaba to Aba el Lissan.

Lawrence had to do something. The first alternative was to put pressure on Hussein to withdraw his statement; the second to ignore the humours of this narrow-minded old man of seventy, and carry on; the third, to set up Feisal in independence of his father and, when Damascus fell, try to give him a throne there. But the difficulty was that the expedition had to start in three days’ time if it was to reach Deraa before Allenby began his advance. The first course was best, to avoid the appearance of dissension among the Arabs, but might take weeks. So Allenby and the High Commissioner of Egypt (who provided Hussein’s subsidy) were at once set to work on the Sherif, whose answers to Feisal through them were cabled across to Akaba in cipher. Lawrence, remembering Hussein’s trick on the telephone, saw to it that the cable-station at Akaba only accepted the desirable parts of the messages and made a hopeless jumble of the others, notifying these to Mecca as ‘corrupt.’ Fortunately Hussein instead of repeating the censored passages, toned them down until at last there came a long message, the first half a lame apology and withdrawal of the proclamation, the other a renewal of the offence in a new form.

AT GUWEIRA

Copyright French Army Photo Dept.

Lawrence suppressed this second half and took the first to Feisal marked ‘very urgent.’ The secretary decoded it and Feisal read it aloud to the staff about him, concealing his surprise at the meek words of his usually obstinate and tyrannical old father. At the end he said, ‘The telegraph has saved all our honour.’ Without Feisal the great expedition to Deraa, which it was hoped might mean also Damascus, would have been incomplete and Lawrence had pressed him to come in spite of his father; Feisal having resigned his command had offered very nobly to come under Lawrence’s. So now he bent towards Lawrence, adding in an undertone: ‘I mean the honour of nearly all of us.’ Lawrence said demurely, ‘I do not understand what you mean.’ Feisal answered, ‘I offered to serve for this last march under your orders, why was that not enough? Because it would not go with your honour,’ said Lawrence. ‘You always prefer mine before your own,’ Feisal murmured, then sprang up energetically to his feet saying, ‘Now, sirs, praise God and work!’

The expedition started only a day late. Lawrence first had to suppress a mutiny among the Arab regular soldiers who knew something bad was happening, but had heard only the false rumour that Feisal had deserted. He had not been seen out of his tent for a week. The gunners thought that their officers were betraying them and ran to turn the guns on their tents. However, Rasim had foreseen this and, secretly collecting the breech-blocks in his own tent, had outwitted them. At this ludicrous moment Lawrence came smiling along and talked to the men, telling as a great joke the whole story of Hussein’s proclamation and the resignations; they laughed like schoolboys at the private quarrels of their leaders. Feisal then appeared, driving through the lines in his Vauxhall car which was painted with the holy green colour of the Prophet’s family; and the situation was saved.

Lawrence went by armoured car to Azrak and at Bair heard the news that the Turks at Hesa had moved suddenly to Tafileh and were advancing south to the relief of Maan. The chief of the Beni Sakhr who brought the news thought Lawrence mad when he laughed aloud. But, now that the expedition had started, the Turks might relieve Maan and take Aba el Lissan, Guweira, Akaba itself for all he cared. The news meant that the Turks believed in the pretended threat to Amman and were making a counter-stroke. Every man that they sent south was a man, or rather ten men lost. Deraa was all that mattered now. To complete the deception Lawrence had sent thousands of his ‘horsemen of St. George’ (British sovereigns) to the Beni Sakhr tribe to purchase all the barley on their threshing-floors for a force that would be shortly coming along from Azrak, through their villages, towards Amman. The Turks got the news soon, as was intended. Hornby was going in charge of the other expedition to join up with Allenby at Jericho, so that if the Deraa plan failed the combined parties could make the feint on Amman a reality. But the Turkish advance on Tafileh checked him and he had instead to defend Shobek against them.

The Deraa expedition was now assembling at Azrak and on the twelfth of September was complete. First arrived Lawrence’s body-guard, jolly on their well-fed camels, then two aeroplanes, then the rest of the armoured cars and a great baggage train. Feisal brought the Arab regular army, a thousand camel-men on Allenby’s gift-camels; with the French Algerian gunners under Pisani. Nuri appeared with the Ruwalla tribesmen; and Auda with Mohammed el Dheilan and the Abu Tayi; and Fahad and Adhub with their Beni Sakhr; and the chief of the Serahin; and many more Bedouin, Druses and town-Syrians flocking from all directions. And the great outlaw Tallal arrived, who had taken Lawrence spying in the Hauran the winter before.

First of all it was necessary to cut off Deraa from Amman. For this purpose a detachment of Indian Gurkhas on camels under their British officer were sent to raid a block-house on the railway just north of Amman, while a party of Egyptian camel-corps blew up near-by bridges and rails. Two armoured cars went with them, and local guides. The rest of the army moved up to Umtaiye, a great rainwater-pit fifteen miles below Deraa, and waited there for news.

Unfortunately this demolition did not come off; the Arabs between the raiders and the line disliked the Indians, despised the Egyptians and would not let them pass. So Lawrence went himself the next day from Umtaiye with two armoured cars and a hundred and fifty pounds of gun-cotton to the nearest point on the line, where there were two good bridges to destroy and easy going for the cars. Joyce came with him. While Joyce’s car kept the neighbouring block-house busy, Lawrence’s ran to the biggest bridge, whose guard-garrison of eight men made a first brave defence but then surrendered—as also did the block-house garrison. Joyce and Lawrence then hurriedly set about the bridge, destroying it scientifically so that the four arches were smashed but the skeleton left tottering. The Turks would first have the difficult task of destroying it completely before they could begin rebuilding.

The cars then bumped off, because a large body of Turks was seen coming up in the distance. Lawrence’s car bumped too carelessly; at the first watercourse there was a crash and it stuck. They hurriedly inspected the damage and found that the front bracket of the near back-spring had broken; a hopeless break which only a workshop could mend. The driver, Rolls, was nearly in tears over this mishap, the first structural damage in a team of nine cars driven for eighteen months over the maddest country. But he realized that the fate of the whole party rested on him and said that there was just one hope. They might jack up the fallen end of the spring and wedge it, by balks upon the running-board, into nearly its old position. With the help of ropes the thin angle-irons of the running-board might carry the additional weight.

There was in each car a length of timber to help the double car-tires over muddy places; three blocks of this would do for the proper height. But there was no saw, so they used machine-gun bullets instead, and soon had their three blocks. The Turks heard the machine-gun firing and halted cautiously. Joyce’s car also heard and came back to help; the repair was hurriedly made, only just in time. When they got back to Umtaiye they strengthened it with telegraph-wire and it lasted until they reached Damascus. The loss of this bridge would keep the Turks from reinforcing Deraa from Amman and also help Zeid and Jaafar with the Arab army at Aba el Lissan, and Hornby at Shobek, for the Turks massing at Tafileh were delayed until the line was mended behind them.

Meanwhile the Arab expedition moved to Tell Arar, four miles north of Deraa, where they were to cut the northern railway to Damascus. Lawrence and Joyce hurrying to join them in the armoured cars arrived late because of bad going over heavy plough-land. They watched the battle from a hill: Ruwalla horsemen dashing towards the line over the liquorice-grown bed of a watercourse, and a Ford car, with machine-guns, bouncing after. A Turkish guard-post opened fire, but Pisani’s guns silenced it and the Ruwalla took it with only one man killed. Ten miles of railway were won in only an hour’s fighting and the Egyptians, after a halt for breakfast, began steady demolition-work from south to north while the Arab army swarmed over the plain. Lawrence could hardly realize the good fortune. It was September the seventeenth, two days before Allenby could throw forward his full power. In two days the Turks might decide to change their dispositions to meet this new danger from the Arabs at Deraa, but they could not do so before Allenby struck. Lawrence had cut the one railway that connected the Turks in Amman, Maan, Medina, Nazareth, Nablus, the Jordan valley, with their base in Damascus and with Aleppo, Constantinople, Germany.

The Egyptians used ‘tulips,’ which were thirty-ounce charges of gun-cotton planted beneath the centre of the central sleeper of each ten-yard section of the track. The sleepers were hollow steel and the explosion made them hump bud-like two feet in the air. The lift pulled the rails three inches up, the drag pulled them six inches together, and the chairs were inwardly warped. This threefold distortion put them beyond repair. And it was quick work; six hundred such charges could be laid and fired in two or three hours and would take the Turks a week to mend. While they were busy, eight Turkish aeroplanes flew out from Deraa and began dropping bombs. They did not seem to notice the Egyptians on the railway but came diving down with machine-gun fire among the Arabs. There was no overhead cover on the plain at all, so the only thing was to scatter and present the thinnest possible target, while Nuri Said’s automatic guns rattled back at the aeroplanes and Pisani’s mountain-guns fired shrapnel and made them fly too high to bomb accurately.

The question now was how to get at the Yarmuk railway-bridge which Lawrence had failed to blow up the year before. Its destruction would top off the cutting of the other two lines from Deraa. The enemy aeroplanes were, however, making movement impossible. There had been two British aeroplanes with the expedition, but the only useful one, a Bristol Fighter, had been damaged in an air-fight the day before and had flown back for repairs to Jerusalem; there remained only an antiquated and almost useless B.E.12 machine. But Junor, the pilot, had heard at Azrak from the pilot of the returning Bristol Fighter that enemy aeroplanes were active at Deraa and most bravely decided to take his place. When things were at their worst at Tell Arar he suddenly sailed in and rattled away at the eight Turkish aeroplanes with his two guns. They scattered for a careful look and he flew westward drawing them after him: he knew that the chance of an air-fight usually makes aeroplanes forget their ground-target. It was deliberate self-sacrifice on Junor’s part, for his machine was utterly useless for air-fighting. Nuri Said hurriedly collected three hundred and fifty regulars and marched them in small parties across the rails. He was making for Mezerib, seven miles west from Deraa, the key to the Yarmuk bridge. The returning aeroplanes would probably not notice that his men were gone. Armed peasants were sent on after Nuri Said, and half an hour later Lawrence called up his body-guard, to follow himself.

As he did so, he heard a droning in the air and to his astonishment Junor appeared, still alive, though surrounded by three enemy aeroplanes, faster than his own, spitting bullets at him. He was twisting and side-slipping splendidly, firing back. But the fight could only end in one way. In a faint hope that he might get down alive Lawrence rushed with his men and another British officer, Young, to clear a landing-place by the railway. Junor was being driven lower; he threw out a message to say that his petrol was finished. The body-guard worked feverishly, rolling away boulders, and Lawrence put out a landing-signal. Junor dived: the machine took the ground beautifully but a flaw of wind then overturned it and he was thrown out. He was up in a moment with only a cut chin, and rescued his Lewis-gun and machine-gun and ammunition just before one of the Turkish aeroplanes dived and dropped a bomb by the wreck. Five minutes later he was asking for another job. Joyce gave him a Ford car and he ran boldly down the hill until near Deraa and blew a gap in the rails there before the Turks saw him. They fired at him with artillery but he bumped off in the Ford, still unhurt.

Lawrence hurried forward to Mezerib with his body-guard, but an aeroplane saw them and began dropping bombs: one, two, three misses, the fourth fell right among them. Two camels fell, terribly wounded, but the riders escaped unhurt and scrambled up behind two of their friends. Another machine came by and dropped more bombs. A shock spun Lawrence’s camel round and nearly knocked him out of the saddle with a numbing pain in his right arm. He felt that he was hard hit and tears came to his eyes with the pain and the disappointment of being put out of action so soon before the triumphant end. Blood was running down his arm. Perhaps, if he did not look at it, he might carry on as if he were unhurt. The aeroplane was machine-gunning them now and his camel swung round. He clutched at the pommel and realized that his damaged arm was there, still in working order. He had judged it blown off. He felt for the wound, and found a very small very hot splinter of metal sticking into his arm. He realized how bad his nerves were. This was, by the way, the first time that he had been hit from the air, of all his twenty or more wounds.

Mezerib surrendered after a bombardment by Pisani’s guns and twenty machine-guns. (Tallal had previously gone forward demanding a bloodless surrender—he knew the stationmaster—but the Turks had fired a volley at him and at Lawrence, who came with him, from point-blank range: they had crawled back painfully through a field of thistles, Tallal swearing.) The station was looted by hundreds of Hauran peasantry. Men, women and children in a frenzy fought like dogs over every object; even doors and windows, door-frames and window-frames, steps of the stairs, were carried off. Others smashed and looted the wagons in the siding. Lawrence and Young cut the telegraph, the Palestine army’s main link with home. They cut it slowly to draw out the indignation of the German-Turkish staff at Nazareth. The Turks’ hopeless lack of initiative made their army a directed one, so that by destroying the telegraph Lawrence went far towards turning them into a leaderless mob. The points were then blown in and tulips planted all over the station track. Among the captures were two lorries crammed with delicacies for some German canteen. Nuri Said found an Arab prising open a tin of bottled asparagus and cried out: ‘Pigs’ bones!’ The peasant spat in horror and threw them down. Nuri Said picked them up and later shared them with Lawrence, Joyce and Young. The trucks were splashed with petrol and set on fire and the blaze that evening acted as a beacon for hundreds and hundreds of Arab peasant rebels who came on camel, on horse, on foot, in great enthusiasm, hoping that this was the final release of their country.

Visitors were welcome. Lawrence’s business was to let each one tell him all the news he wanted to tell; afterwards re-arranging it in his mind and getting a clear picture of the whole enemy situation. Even the magistrates of Deraa itself came offering to open the town, but Lawrence put them off, to their disappointment. Though he knew that the town controlled the local water-supply, the possession of which must force the railway-station to surrender too, he would not risk accepting the gift. If Allenby did not completely break the Turks, Deraa might be retaken and a merciless massacre of the Hauran peasants would follow.

The next step was to blow up Tell el Shehab bridge. There had arrived the boy-chief of Tell el Shehab village, which crowned the cliff above the bridge: he described the position of the large Turkish guard at the bridge. Lawrence thought that he was probably lying, but he went off and soon returned with his friend the commander of the Turkish bridge-guard, an Armenian captain, who confirmed the story. The Armenian was anxious to betray his charge; he suggested an ambush in his own room at the village to which he would in turn call all his lieutenants, sergeants and corporals—hated Turks—to be trussed up by three or four waiting Arabs. The rest of the force would be ready then to rush the leaderless guard. Lawrence agreed and at eleven o’clock he and Nasir were close to the village with camel-men and the body-guard bringing bags of gelatine. Lawrence knew the bridge well since his attempt on it with Ali ibn el Hussein and Fahad from the other side of the ravine. It was pitch-dark and the damp air came up from the river, wetting their woollen coats. Waiting for the Armenian to come and fetch the trussers-up they could hear the occasional cries of the sentry challenging passers-by on the bridge far below, and the constant roar of the waterfall, and then the noise of a train, with the squealing of brakes as it stopped in the station close by the bridge. After awhile the boy-chief came up holding his brown cloak open to show his white shirt like a flag. He whispered that the plan had failed. The train in the ravine had been sent up with German and Turk reserves from Afuleh under a German colonel to rescue panic-stricken Deraa. They had arrested the Armenian captain for being absent from his post. There were dozens of machine-guns and dozens of sentries patrolling up and down.

Nuri Said offered to take the place by main force. Surprise and numbers were on the Arab side, but Lawrence was at his old game of reckoning the cost and as usual found it too dear. They said good night to the chief, thanked him, and turned back. Lawrence, Nasir and Nuri Said sat with rifles ready on the cliff edge, waiting for their men to get back out of danger. Lawrence’s rifle was a famous one, a British Lee-Enfield captured at the Dardanelles and given by Enver, the Turkish commander-in-chief, as a present to Feisal, with an inscription on a gold plate; Feisal had given it to Lawrence. It was a great temptation sitting there to fire a rocket pistol into the station and scare the Germans into all-night terror. Nasir, Nuri and Lawrence all had the same childish idea at the same moment, but managed to restrain each other from carrying it out. Instead, some of the body-guard were sent to blow up rails in the ravine a mile or two beyond the bridge, Tallal providing guides. The echoing explosions gave the Germans a bad night. Then the rest of the army moved from Mezerib towards Nisib on their way back to Umtaiye. Before leaving they lit a long time-fuse to a mine under the water-tower. When the Germans came forward from Tell el Shehab—they heard that Mezerib was empty—the mine exploded with a tremendous noise and they cautiously retired again.

Nisib was ten miles south of Deraa. Pisani’s guns shelled the station at two thousand yards’ range and the machine-guns supported him. But the Turks would not surrender, returning a hot fire from the trenches. This did not matter much, for the real objective was not the station but a great bridge a few hundred yards to the north, protected by a Turkish post which Nuri Said now began to bombard. Lawrence’s men were tired out, like their camels, and when he asked them to come forward with him against the bridge they refused. They knew that one bullet in the gelatine that they were carrying would blow them sky-high.

It was the first time that they had flinched. Lawrence tried to get them forward by making jokes, but it was hopeless. At last he cast them off and standing on the crest with bullets cracking round him called by name the youngest and most timid of them all to come with him to the bridge. He shook like a man in a sick dream but obeyed quietly. They rode over the crest towards the bridge. Lawrence then sent the young Arab back to tell the men that he would hurt them worse than bullets if they did not join him. He intended to go forward to see whether the guard-post was holding out after the bombardment. While the body-guard hesitated, up came El Zaagi with Abdulla the Robber: they were men who feared nothing. Mad with fury that Lawrence had been betrayed these two dashed at the shrinkers and chased them over the ridge-top, with no more harm than six bullet-grazes. The post was indeed abandoned, so Lawrence dismounted and signalled to Nuri Said to cease fire. He and his body-guard crept up on foot to the bridge and piling eight hundred pounds of explosive against the piers, which were about five feet thick and twenty-five feet high, blew it to pieces. This was Lawrence’s last bridge, the seventy-ninth since he started and a most important one, for the Arab army was to wait close by at Umtaiye until Allenby’s troops came up to join it.

The Turkish aeroplanes were a pest, Umtaiye was only twelve miles from their aerodrome near Deraa and they kept coming over and dropping bombs on the Arab camp. The irregulars would soon lose their nerve and go off home unless something was done; so Lawrence and Junor went off in two armoured cars to raid the aerodrome. They got quite close by silencing the cars and found three aeroplanes on the ground. One they shot to pieces; the two others escaping flew to Deraa and returned to chase the cars with bombs. The first dropped its four bombs all together from a height and missed badly, but the other flew low, placing one bomb at a time with great care. Lawrence and Junor drove slowly on over rocky ground, quite defenceless. One bomb sent a shower of stones through the driving slit of Lawrence’s car but only cut his knuckles. Another tore off a front tire and nearly overturned them. But they returned safely to Umtaiye.

AN ARMOURED FORD IN THE DESERT

Copyright Imperial War Museum

Two days later a news-aeroplane was due at Azrak, so Lawrence decided to go back in it to Palestine and beg Allenby to send along some Bristol Fighters. He rode towards Azrak with his body-guard, intending on the way to smash another bridge. But he noticed that his men were red-eyed and trembling and obeyed orders with hesitation: evidently El Zaagi and The Robber had mercilessly gone through the list of those who had flinched at Nisib. He decided that they were not in form that night, so sent the Egyptians and Gurkhas (on the first stage of their journey back to help Zeid at Aba el Lissan) to do the raid instead. He followed them in an armoured car and Junor came, too, in his Ford. Lawrence, who was guiding, lost the way in the darkness; his wits were wandering after five sleepless nights in succession. But the Egyptians fired their thirty tulips all right, while Lawrence and Junor overtook a train and machine-gunned it. Junor let fly a green shower of tracer-bullets which probably did little harm but made the Turks howl with terror.

At Azrak they found the aeroplane waiting with the first amazing news of Allenby’s victory. He had burst through at every point and the Turkish army was in rout. Lawrence sent the news to Feisal, advising him to proclaim the general revolt at last, and flew off to Palestine. An hour or two later he was with Allenby who was very calm in spite of the magnitude of his victory and was allowing the Turks no rest. He was making three new thrusts: with the New Zealanders to Amman, with the Indians to Deraa, with the Australians to Kuneitra in the Hauran. The New Zealanders would stop at Amman but the other two divisions would later converge on Damascus. Allenby asked Lawrence to assist all three advances with his Arabs but not to push on to Damascus until the Indians and Australians were in line with him. Lawrence in return asked for aeroplanes, and was given them: two Bristol Fighters, with an enormous Handley-Page and a D.H.9 to carry petrol and spare parts.

Back with the Arabs the next day Lawrence told them that Nablus was taken and Afuleh and Haifa and Baisan. The news ran like fire through the camp. Tallal began boasting, the Ruwalla shouted for instant march on Damascus, even the still smarting body-guard cheered up. That day, the twenty-second of September, Lawrence was breakfasting near Umtaiye with the airmen: there were sausages frying. Suddenly a watcher called out:‘Aeroplane up.’ The pilots of the Bristol Fighters Jumped into their machines, and the pilot of the D.H.9 looked hard at Lawrence, silently asking him to come up with him to handle the machine-guns. Lawrence pretended not to understand. He had learned the theory of air-fighting all right, but it was knowledge not yet become instinctive action. No, he would not go up. The pilot looked reproachfully at him while the air-fight began without them. Five minutes later the Bristols were back, having driven down a two-seater and scattered three scout-aeroplanes. The sausages were still hot. They ate them and drank some tea and were starting on some grapes, a present from the Druse country, when again the watcher cried ‘Aeroplane’ and up the pilots jumped and soon brought it down in flames.

Later with Feisal (whom he had gone by air to fetch with his staff from Azrak) and Nuri, the Emir of the Ruwalla, Lawrence went off north in Feisal’s green Vauxhall to see the Handley-Page alight. Twenty miles from the landing-ground they met a single Arab tribesman running southward like the prophet Elijah with grey hair and grey beard flying in the wind and his clothes girded about his loins. He yelled out to the car, waving his bony arms, ‘The biggest aeroplane in the world’ and rushed on to spread his great news among the tents. They found the Handley-Page surrounded by Arabs who cried out, ‘Indeed and at last they have sent us the aeroplane, of which these others were foals.’ Before night the news had spread all over the Hauran and across the Druse mountains and every one knew by this token that the Arabs were on the winning side. The great machine unloaded a ton of petrol, oil and spare parts for the Bristol Fighters, and rations for the men; then sailed off for night-bombing at Deraa.

The task that Allenby had set the Arab army was to harass the Turkish Fourth Army until the New Zealanders forced it out of Amman, its headquarters, and afterwards to cut it up on its retreat north. Feisal’s force now consisted of four thousand men, of whom three thousand were irregulars. But these irregulars were nearly all under the sovereignty of the Emir Nuri, whose word nobody dared disobey, so Feisal could count on them. The old man led a charge of Ruwalla horsemen in a further raid on the railway and under his eye the tribe showed unusual valour; armoured cars came along too and the line was now permanently broken between Amman and Deraa. It only remained to wait for the fugitives streaming up from Amman in flight from the New Zealanders.

A body of hostile cavalry was reported to be coming north towards them. The Emir Nuri with his Ruwalla horse and Tallal with his Hauran horse went to meet it. Armoured cars joined them. But it was only a mob of fugitives looking for a short cut home, so hundreds of prisoners were taken and much transport. A panic spread down the line and troops miles away from the Arabs threw away all they had, even their rifles, making a mad rush towards supposed safety in Deraa.