With Lawrence in Arabia

by Lowell Thomas

The Syrians in a body transferred their allegiance to him. Next morning the combined Syrian and Arabian forces descended the chalk mountain and destroyed three hundred rails on a side-line of the Damascus-Medina Railway, near Aneiza. They also tried to capture the terminus of this spur, where seven hundred Armenian wood-cutters, whom they wanted to rescue, were at work. But this time the Turks had erected such strong fortifications around the terminus that, although the Arabs and Syrian deserters took the Turkish outposts, they were unable to capture the main positions. The Turks, badly frightened, sent couriers to Maan and Abu el Lissal asking for reinforcements. By weakening their garrison at Abu el Lissal the Turks played directly into Lawrence’s hands, for as soon as the Turkish reserves arrived Lawrence called his men back to Petra from the railway.

After the desertion of the entire Shobek garrison and Lawrence’s bold sortie against the railway terminus, Djemal Pasha, commander-in-chief of the Turkish armies in Syria, Palestine, and Arabia, decided, against the advice of Field-Marshal von Falkenhayn, then German generalissimo in the Near East, that before he could hope to recapture Gueirra and Akaba it would be necessary to retake Petra. Djemal transferred a crack cavalry regiment, an infantry brigade, and several organizations of light artillery from Palestine down the Hedjaz Railway to Maan. This was a clever strategic coup for Lawrence. First, the Germans and Turks had to diminish their forces opposing Allenby in the Holy Land. Secondly, they were walking into the trap which had been set for them; because it was Lawrence’s belief that if a battle were fought by his irregular Bedouin troops in the mountain fastnesses of ancient Edom, the superior mobility of his army would eventually enable him to defeat any division of methodically trained regulars in the world.

Malud Bey, Lawrence’s first in command at the battle of Petra, was one of the most interesting figures of the Arabian revolt, as well as one of the most picturesque. He wore very high purple-topped Kafir boots—like Jack the Giant-Killer must have worn; also spurs that jangled musically as he strode about, a long medieval sword, and a long mustachio, which he tugged like the villain of a melodrama. But there was no more charming and gallant officer in the whole Arabian army. He was the son of a Bedouin sheik and a Circassian concubine and from boyhood had been an ardent Arab Nationalist. He made a thorough study of modern military science in order that some day he might help to overthrow the Turk, and he even went so far as to spend three years studying at the Turkish Staff College before they discovered his revolutionary leanings and expelled him. Then he went into the desert and became secretary to Ibn Rashid, one of the potentates of Central Arabia. There Malud participated in scores of raids and earned such a reputation as a fighter that the Turks forgave him his past sins and invited him to return and join their cavalry. At the outbreak of the World War he was raised to the rank of captain, but he was later court-martialed and imprisoned for taking part in a conspiracy against the sultan. After his release he fought the British in Mesopotamia and was captured by them near Basra. Eventually he was allowed to join Feisal. He was wounded in every single engagement in which he took part, because he was so foolhardy that he would not hesitate to charge the Turkish army by himself.

Djemal Pasha selected Maan, the most important station on the Hedjaz Railway between the Dead Sea of Medina, as the starting-point for three columns comprising over seven thousand men, several units of light artillery, and a squadron of German aëroplanes. One column made the Crusaders’ castle at Shobek its base; another came up from the south by the way of Abu el Lissal and Busta; and the third moved direct from Maan on the east. The Turks directed the movements of their columns so that they would all converge on Petra on October 21.

In the meantime Lawrence and his Bedouins were comfortably and safely lodged in the ancient capital of the Nabatæans, behind those mighty rocky ramparts which had defied the armies of Alexander the Great. For the first time in many centuries the silent avenues throbbed with life. Camp-fires were lighted on the old altars of the gods; and sentinels stationed on the ancient great high places watched for the coming of the Turks. In the vast echoing chambers of the tombs the Arabs sat around in circles until late at night, telling interminable stories and singing old chants of epic battles. Lawrence himself occupied princely headquarters, the Temple of Isis (El Khazneh), the rose-tinted palace at the entrance of the gorge. If he wished he could have used his archæological imagination and re-peopled the gloomy hall with the vision of handmaidens of Isis dancing before the shrine of their goddess.

Instead, he sent for Sheik Khallil of Elgi, a neighboring village, and told him it would be necessary to summon all the able-bodied women for miles around to help reinforce his troops. Arabian women may not have gone in for Red Cross work and women’s motor-corps or canteen service, as their Western sisters did during the war, but they have always encouraged their men to fight. In the incessant tribal warfare they are often in the rear, encouraging their men with praise, chanting songs of Bedouin heroes, and shrieking words of blame if their own men-folk are not gallantly charging into the thick of the fray. A few centuries ago the fighting forces of the desert always had two or three of their women dressed in resplendent robes to act as standard-bearers. This, however, was the first time in Arabian history that armed battalions of women actually engaged in battle.

The Bedouin women living in the vicinity of Petra rose magnificently to the emergency. They dropped their butter-making and their weaving and thronged to Lawrence’s headquarters under the leadership of Sheik Khallil’s wife. No smart uniforms with braid and buttons for the Bedouin Amazons! Barefooted, with long blue cotton robes, wearing gold bracelets and rings in their ears and noses, they gathered from all quarters to form their Battalion of Death. Rallying to the call of Lawrence, who had few men at his disposal, they fought with as great valor as their husbands and brothers and played a vital part in routing the Turks.

Lawrence, remembering the stout defense put up by the old Nabatæan kings, when Alexander’s army failed to capture Petra, stationed the Bedouin women at the narrow gorge opposite the Temple of Isis to defend the city. The women were fierce in their enthusiasm and needed no coaching to make them capable musketeers. They hid behind the pillars of the temple, some of them with their half-grown children, and covered with their rifles the gorge, which was so narrow that only a few Turks and Germans could march through abreast. The women held their ground and were not even panic-stricken when German aëroplanes swooped down over the rock temples and dropped bombs on the streets, theater and water-circus. They clutched their rifles only the more tightly when one German bomb made a direct hit on an Arabian machine-gun, causing the Maxim and its crew to vanish as though spirited away. Throughout the whole battle Lawrence commanded from the top of the north ridge. He had with him a force of fifty Bedouin youths, who were selected for their speed as runners and who proved most valuable as orderlies. They could sprint like hares and clamber about the rocks with the agility of the oryx. If one had viewed the battle from the Arabian positions and seen only the women and the Bedouin men dressed in every conceivable desert costume, mounted on horses and camels without saddles, and using nearly every weapon invented by man from the dawn of time, if one could have eliminated the modern note provided by the trench-helmets and commonplace lead-colored uniforms of the Turks and by their squadron of aëroplanes, one might easily have mistaken the battle of Petra for a clash between the ancient Edomites and the kings of Israel.