The Bedouins were all particularly fond of wrist-watches, revolvers, and field-glasses, so that Lawrence used to take two or three camels laden with trinkets of that sort to give away. He also gave his men from fifty to one hundred pounds of ammunition each day, and they always shot it off into the air regardless of whether they were fighting or not! In most armies if a man fires off a single round of ammunition without the permission of his commanding officer, he is court-martialed. The Arabs shot at every sparrow they saw, and one day, when a false rumor came in to us at Akaba that Maan had been captured by Feisal’s chief of staff, General Nuri Bey, thousands of rounds were fired wildly into the sky. If the Bedouins who came into the supply-bases along the Red Sea coast happened to see a British officer strolling along with nothing but a riding-crop or a stick, they would shake their heads, stroke their beards, and say: “Mad Anglesi! Mad Anglesi!” But if the officer were wandering about with a rifle blazing away at every rock or bird in sight, they would remark in the Arabian equivalent: “I say, these blighters are not such silly asses after all. Really, they are quite sane, don’t you know.”
Like the sepoys of India in the days of Clive, the Bedouins refused to clean their rifles with grease made from pork, simply because the Mohammedan religion teaches them that pork is unclean. So Lawrence either had to clean all the rifles in the Arabian army himself or provide rifles that did not have to be cleaned. He solved this problem by equipping them with German nickel-steel rifles which Allenby had captured on the Palestine front, rifles that could survive a year’s service without being cleaned.
The freedom of the desert has been his for thousands of years; so naturally the Bedouin is independent by nature. “Discipline” and “obedience” are unknown words to him. Probably none of Lawrence’s men would have made a high record in the senior examinations at Sandhurst or West Point, but they did know how to fight the Turks—and how to whip them. They regarded themselves as of equal rank with any general!
These, then, were the men Lawrence had to mold from an inchoate, intertribal conglomeration into a large army capable of defeating highly trained and well-officered forces. All the organization had to be improvised on original lines. There was no commissariat department. When the Bedouin irregulars started off on an expedition, each man carried a small bag of flour and some coffee. Every meal was the same. The entire army lived and fought on unleavened bread baked in ashes. The Arabs could eat a pound or two at a time, but Lawrence usually carried a chunk in the folds of his gown and nibbled at it as he rode at the head of a column.
The Bedouin looked upon tinned food as a dubious institution. One day, when Major Maynard was accompanying us on a journey over the desert northeast of Akaba, he handed a tin of bully beef to each of the men with us. They took the meat reluctantly and seemed to regard it as unholy. It was then we discovered how suspicious the Arab was of things in tins—but from religious, not hygienic motives. It is customary for an Arab, when he cuts the throat of a sheep or of any other animal, to say, as he inserts the knife, “In the name of Allah the Merciful and the Compassionate!” When they opened the tins they repeated these same words, fearful lest the Chicago packers had not performed the ceremony according to the law of the Prophet.
Apart from a few such formal observances, the average Bedouin is by no means a religious fanatic. He refuses to take notice of the three cardinal principles of Mohammedanism. He never fasts for, says he, “We never have enough to eat as it is!” He rarely bathes, using the excuse, “We have not even enough water to drink.” He seldom prays, for he maintains, “Our prayers are never answered, so why bother?”
But with all his looting and his lack of religion, the Bedouin is a man of honor and a man of humor.
CHAPTER XVIII
A ROSE-BED CITY HALF AS OLD AS TIME
One of the most colorful and romantic episodes of the war in the Land of the Arabian Nights was a battle fought in an ancient deserted city that had been asleep for a thousand years, only to wake to the booming of big guns and the spirited clash of Turks and Arabs. Here, among the immemorial and perfect ruins of a lost civilization, Lawrence the archæologist and Lawrence the military genius merged in one. To the few travelers who have ventured into that hidden corner of the Arabian desert it is known as a “rose-red city, half as old as time,” carved out of the enchanted mountains of Edom. It lies deep in the wilderness of the desert, not far from Mount Hor, where the Israelites are believed to have buried their great leader, Aaron.