He began to ask himself why they were bothering to attack Medina. What was the good of it to the Arabs if they captured it? It was no longer a threat as it had been when there were troops in it to spare for the attack on Mecca. It was no use as a base or a store-house. The Turks in it were powerless to harm the Arabs, and were now eating their own transport animals which they could no longer feed. Why not let them keep the town? Why do more than continue to blockade it? What of the railway, which used up a vast quantity of men in guard posts all down the line and yet was too long to be properly defended? Why not be content with frequent raids on it, between guard posts, blowing up trains and bridges, and yet allowing it to be just—only just—kept in working order, so that it would be a continual drain on the Turks to the north to keep it going and to feed the troops in Medina? To cut it permanently would be a mistake. The surrender of Medina would mean that the captured Turks would have to be fed, many of the troops guarding the railway would make their way back north, and the drain on the Turks of men and trains and food would stop. The Allied cause would, in fact, be best served by attracting and keeping as many Turkish troops as possible in this unimportant theatre of war, and by using as many Arabs as possible in the important theatre of war, which was Palestine.
When Lawrence got better, therefore, and left his stinking, fly-swarmed tent he did not urge Abdulla to attack Medina but suggested a series of pin-pricking raids against the railway, offering to set an example in these himself. Abdulla was more a politician than a man of action and more interested in field sports and practical joking than in generalship. However, he permitted Sherif Shakir, his picturesque half-Bedouin cousin, to make a raid against the nearest station on the railway, a hundred miles away, with a party of Ateiba tribesmen and one of the mountain-guns which the Egyptian gunners had left with Feisal and which Feisal had lately sent to Abdulla as a present. Lawrence, convalescent, went with Shakir, and, on the twenty-seventh of March, laid his first mine, an automatic one, on the railway. Because it was his first it was not very successful. He caught the front wheel of a train all right, but the charge was not big enough to do serious damage. Nor did Shakir succeed in his raid beyond killing a score of Turks, damaging the water-tower and station buildings with his gun, and setting a few wagons on fire; there was, that is to say, no looting. The chief dramatic interest of the raid seems to have centred round a shepherd boy who was captured by the Arabs and tied up while his sheep, Turkish property, were eaten before his unhappy eyes. However, Lawrence went again a day or two later with a party of Juheina to experiment further in automatic mines: he was fortunate enough to have a preliminary failure. A long train from Medina, full of women and children, ‘useless mouths’ whom the Turks could not feed and so were sending up to Syria, passed over the mine without exploding it. There had been a cloudburst the day before, in which Lawrence and his men had been caught, and the mechanism, owing probably to the slight sinking of the ground after the rain, was not in touch with the rails. He adjusted this when night came and, blowing up a few rails and a small bridge to explain plausibly to the Turks (who had seen them and were firing and blowing bugles all down the line) what he and the tribesmen were about, went away and left the mine behind. It caught the expected repair-train. Most of this story, the episodes of the two months, March and April 1917, which are left blank in Revolt in the Desert, are accessible, in greater detail, to inquisitive readers. The World’s Work magazine published them as an article in America in 1921. The fees for this contribution and three others following went not to Lawrence but to keep a poet, who had lost money in an attempt to start a grocery-shop, from the bankruptcy court. Lawrence took great care, for some reason, not to let them appear in England; and as I was the poet, and this book has the same text for England and America, the details will not be given by me now.
The fruits of Lawrence’s visit to Abdulla, measured in action, were small. Abdulla did not have his brother Feisal’s energy and military keenness, and had been allotted an unattractive part in the campaign, the blockade of Medina, which encouraged the inactive side of his character. (The siege of the city was never pressed and dragged on until after the Armistice in October 1918 when the commander, Fakhri Pasha, was given orders from Constantinople to hand Medina over to the Arab forces; and did so, compelled by a mutiny of his chief staff-officers.) But, apart from action, Lawrence’s visit to Abdulla was of considerable importance; it marked a turning-point in the Arab campaign. His fortnight’s solitary thinking in that tent gave him convictions: he decided on the tactics and strategy necessary if his party were to achieve that success in the north which he regarded as essential to justify the Arab Revolt. We find him acting hereafter with great deliberation and confidence, in striking contrast to his previous hesitating attitude as adviser to Feisal in the Yenbo and Wejh operations. He had been right before, but more or less by luck.
On April the tenth Lawrence returned to Wejh by leisurely stages. Abdulla had been very hospitable, but Lawrence preferred the atmosphere of Feisal’s camp, where there was a more energetic spirit and a determination to win the war with as little Allied help as possible. A good way farther north on the railway than he had laid his mines there were now two parties doing demolitions (Garland’s and Newcombe’s, and Hornby’s), but the Turks would find it just a shade less difficult to keep the railway going between Damascus and Medina than to arrange for the long and dangerous march-out of the Medina garrison. At Wejh he found things going on well. More armoured cars had come from Egypt, and Yenbo and Rabegh had been emptied of their stores and men as a proof that the Revolt was now safe in the south and was moving north. The aeroplanes under Major Ross were here and also a new machine-gun company of amusing history. When Yenbo was abandoned there were left behind some heaps of broken weapons and two English armourer-sergeants. Also thirty sick and wounded Arabs. The armourer-sergeants, finding things boring, had dosed and healed the men and mended the machine-guns, and combined them into a company. The sergeants knew no Arabic but trained the men so well by dumb-show that they were as good as the best company in the Arab army.
XIII
Lawrence was about to withdraw from Feisal’s tent at Wejh after the exchange of news and greetings, when there was a stir of excitement. A messenger came in and whispered to Feisal. Feisal turned to Lawrence with shining eyes, trying to be calm, and said: ‘Auda is here.’ The tent-flap was drawn back, and a deep voice boomed out salutations to ‘Our Lord, the Commander of the Faithful,’ then entered a tall strong figure, with a haggard face, passionate and tragic. It was Auda; and with him Mohammed, his only surviving son, a boy of eleven years old, already a fighting man. Feisal had sprung to his feet, an honour not due to Auda on account of his rank, for nobler chiefs had been received sitting, but because he was Auda, the greatest fighting man in Arabia. Auda caught Feisal’s hand and kissed it; then they drew aside a pace or two and looked at each other, a splendidly unlike pair, Feisal the prophet, and Auda the warrior, each true to his type. They had an immediate understanding and liking for each other at this first meeting.
AUDA
from a drawing by ERIC KENNINGTON
Auda was simply dressed in white cotton robes and a red headcloth. He looked over fifty and his black hair was streaked with white: yet he was straight and vigorous, and as active as a much younger man. His hospitality was such that only very hungry guests did not find it inconvenient; his generosity kept him poor in spite of the profits of a hundred raids. He had married twenty-eight times, and had been wounded thirteen times. He had killed seventy-five men with his own hand in battle and never a man except in battle. These were all Arabs; Turks he did not count and could not guess at the score. Nearly all his family and kin had been killed in the wars which he had provoked. He made a point of being at enmity with nearly all the tribes of the desert so that he might have proper scope for raids, which he made as often as possible. There was always an element of foresight in his maddest adventures, and his patience in battle was great. If he got angry his face would twitch uncontrollably and he would burst into a fit of shaking passion which could only be calmed by battle: at such times he was like a wild beast and men fled from his presence. Nothing on earth could make him change his mind or obey an order or do anything of which he disapproved. He saw life as an epic in which he took a leading part, though indeed he believed his ancestors even mightier men than himself. His mind was stored with old ballads of battle, and he was always singing them in his great voice to the nearest listener or to the empty air. He spoke of himself in the third person and was so sure of his fame that he would even shout out stories against himself. He had a demon of mischief worse even than Lawrence’s and in public gatherings would say the most reckless or tactless things that he could find to say: more than that, he would invent and utter on oath dreadful tales of the private life of his hosts or guests. Yet even those whom he most embarrassed loved him warmly; for he was modest, simple as a child, honest, kind-hearted.