Lawrence and the Arabs

by Robert Graves

I heard the following story from a friend who was present at a state banquet given after the War at Maan in Transjordania when Sir Herbert Samuel, who had just been made High Commissioner of Palestine, was introduced to all the great chiefs of the district. Sir Herbert, somewhat shaken by an attempt that had just been made on his life, was glad of Lawrence’s chance presence as interpreter. In his speech he trusted that the great chief Auda (turning towards him) was pleased with the settlement of the Turkish empire and hoped that a long reign of peace had begun in the East. Lawrence translated this into Arabic, and Auda burst out violently in answer, ‘What peace so long as the French are in Syria, the English in Mesopotamia, and the Jews in Palestine?’ Lawrence, with equal mischief, translated this literally into English, without turning a hair. Fortunately Sir Herbert was content to answer with a smile.

Auda had come down to Wejh chafing at the delay of the campaign, anxious only to spread the bounds of Arab freedom to his own desert lands. The weight of anxiety was off the minds of Feisal and Lawrence before even they sat down to supper. It was a cheerful meal but suddenly interrupted by Auda, who leaped up with a loud ‘God forbid!’ and ran from the tent. A loud hammering was heard outside and the rest of the company stared at each other. It was Auda pounding his false teeth to fragments on a stone. I had forgotten, he explained, that Jemal Pasha (the Turkish commander in Syria who had hanged so many of the Arab leaders) ‘gave me these. I was eating my Lord Feisal’s bread with Turkish teeth!’ As a result Auda, having few teeth of his own, went about half-nourished for two months until a dentist was sent from Egypt to make him an Allied set.

Auda and Lawrence liked each other at first sight. The irony of their friendship has never been properly appreciated. From his schooldays onward, the greater part of Lawrence’s imaginative life seems to have been lived in the mediæval romances of Frankish and Norman chivalry. This was not a light passing romanticism, for Lawrence’s Irish-Hebridean blood would not allow such a thing: light romanticism is an English trait. It was, as I have said, an incurable romanticism which is at times not to be distinguished from realism. An English schoolboy is content to play for awhile at being a knight of the Round Table out of the Idylls of the King, or a jousting baron out of Ivanhoe; but later to dismiss the game as a stupidity and take to football, cigarette-smoking and the appreciation of cinema-actresses. Lawrence did nothing of the sort. Instead he went behind Tennyson’s Victorian sentimentality to the bolder and finer Morte D’Arthur of Malory; nor was he content to play at being a knight of the Holy Grail without binding himself, for the sake of personal efficiency, to the same rules of chastity and temperance and gentleness that Malory’s Galahad had kept; he certainly kept and keeps a knightly sense of honour as strictly as a Geraint, or a Walter de Manny. He went behind Scott’s false mediævalism in search of the real mediævalism; made an intense study of ancient armour and cathedrals and castles; read old French, studied the Crusades in the Holy Land itself. As an undergraduate he told a friend that in his opinion the world had virtually come to an end in 1500, destroyed by gunpowder and cheap printing. Lawrence so logically pursued his romantic career, which began by putting his nose between the pages of Scott and Tennyson, and then between those of Morris and Malory, and then between those of the original mediæval French and Latin romances, that at last he forced his whole head and shoulders and body between the pages of an epic in the making, and in the first book met Feisal, and in the second Auda.

This would have been all very well if Lawrence’s mediævalism had been natural as Auda’s was, the Middle Ages being not yet over in Arabia when he was born. But in his struggle against the forces of false romanticism, to avoid becoming a second Don Quixote, Lawrence had to arm himself with a careful twentieth-century scepticism which he continually used in test of his behaviour; true mediævalism was often cynical, never sceptical. It is, therefore, interesting to note that he carried three books with him throughout the Arabian campaign. The first was Malory’s Morte D’Arthur; but the second was the comedies of Aristophanes, whose laughing scepticism, especially in his anti-militaristic Lysistrata, provides a fine antidote to false romanticism.

His choice of a third book was equally interesting—the Oxford Book of English Verse, a collection which, in my opinion, gives the poetry it contains too strong an atmosphere of literary artistry. Perhaps I should have added to my portrait of Lawrence that his blind desire to be a literary artist is the more to be wondered at because he might well be something better than a mere artist. Artistic writing comes from a competitive literary atmosphere and should be the last thing on earth for Lawrence to aim at; the pursuit of ‘style’ is a social practice of the vulgarest sort. Lawrence may be excused for carrying this anthology (which is no worse than most other anthologies and weighs little when printed on India paper) if he chose it merely as a mixed potpourri of the English poets, faintly recalling the true smell of each individual. But I do not believe that this was the case; for a straining after literary artistry is one of his characteristics. The justification of the literary epic that came out of this adventure, his Seven Pillars, is that where the pursuit of style is forgotten in the excitement of story-telling there is clean and beautiful writing, and that where it is not forgotten one feels that Lawrence is admitting an unfortunate taint, the suppression of which would be a suppression of part of the truth about himself. He has, in fact, only been able to keep his integrity by confessing to an occasional weakness. But of this more later. The influence of the Oxford Book of English Verse on his feelings and actions during the campaign would be well worth studying. The copy survives with marginal annotations, many of these dated.

At all events, Auda accepted Lawrence as a fellow-mediævalist (the shadow of the Crusades happily not falling between them) and Lawrence was content in his company and went through the next book of the epical romance with only occasional critical doubts about himself. There was need for true epic action if Akaba was to be taken, for it was a feat beyond the scope of unheroic twentieth-century soldiering. So the two took counsel together for a journey northward to catch Auda’s Howeitat in their spring pastures of the Syrian desert: they would raise a camel-corps there and take Akaba by surprise from the east without guns or machine-guns. This would mean an encircling march of six hundred miles to capture a position which was within gun-fire of the British Fleet—which indeed was raiding the port at the moment. Yet the longest way was the only way; for Akaba was so strongly protected by the hills, elaborately fortified for miles back, that if a landing were attempted from the sea a small Turkish force could hold up a whole Allied division in the defiles. On the other hand, the Turks had never thought of facing their fortifications east against attack from inland. Auda’s men could probably rush them easily with help of neighbouring clans of Howeitat from the coast and in the hills. The importance of Akaba was great. It was a constant threat to the British Army which had now reached the Gaza-Beersheba line and therefore left it behind the right flank: a small Turkish force from Akaba could do great damage and might even strike at Suez. But Lawrence saw that the Arabs needed Akaba as much and more than the British. If they took it, they could link up with the British Army at Beersheba, and show by their presence that they were a real national army, one to be reckoned with. Nothing but actual contact could ever convince the British that the Arabs were really worth considering as allies, and once the contact was made, there would be no more difficulty about guns, money and equipment: the Arab campaign would no longer be a side-show but part of the main battle, and the British would feed it properly.

Lawrence discussed with the British officers at Wejh, Feisal’s advisers, the tactics that had occurred to him while he was lying sick in Abdulla’s camp. It must always be remembered that Lawrence, though the Englishman most respected by the Arabs, was not the only one fighting in Arabia, and, more than that, was not even a senior officer. On this occasion his views were disregarded. It had been decided some weeks before, chiefly on Lawrence’s impulse, to march the whole force inland from Wejh and occupy a large stretch of the pilgrims’ railway with mixed Egyptian and Arab troops; all arrangements had been made and it was hoped that Medina would soon surrender. But Lawrence had changed his mind: he now argued, against this scheme, that it had been found bad policy to mix Egyptians and Arabs, that the Arabs could not be trusted to attack or defend a line or a point against regular troops, that the country which they proposed to hold was barren, and that to force the Turks to waste men and arms and food in holding Medina and the railway line would harm them more than any military defeat that could be inflicted on them. However, plans were already too far advanced, and Lawrence could do nothing to sidetrack the expedition. He decided to go off on his own to take Akaba and to ask his seniors for no help in arms or stores that would in any way weaken their own expedition.

Feisal was his stand-by (Feisal thought and planned and worked for every one) and gave him twenty-two thousand pounds in gold from his own purse to pay the wages of the party and of all the new men enrolled during the journey. Sherif Nasir, usual leader of forlorn hopes, was in command. Seventeen Ageyl went as escort, and to deal with the Syrian Arab converts in the north came Zeki and Nesib, both important men of Damascus. The gold was shared out between Nasir, Auda, Nesib and Zeki. The party started on May the ninth; every man carried a forty-five-pound bag of flour with him as his rations for six weeks. There were a few spare rifles for presents, and six camel-loads of blasting gelatine for blowing up rails, trains or bridges in the north. It seemed a small force to go out to win a new province, and so thought the French representative with Feisal, who rode up to take a farewell photograph. Auda was worth photographing; he was dressed in finery that he had bought at Wejh—a mouse-coloured greatcoat of broadcloth with a velvet collar, and yellow elastic-sided boots. Nasir was the guide and knew this country almost as well as his own; after two years of fighting and preaching always beyond the front line of Feisal’s armies he was very weary and sunken in spirit. He talked sorrowfully to Lawrence of his beautiful home in Medina, the great cool house and its gardens planted with every sort of fruit-tree, the shady avenues, the vine-trellised swimming tank, the deep well with its wheel turned by oxen, the many fountains. Now, he said, the blight of the Turks was on the place: his fruit-trees were wasted, his palms chopped down. Even the great well, which had sounded with the creak of the wheel for six hundred years, had fallen silent; the garden, cracked with heat, was becoming as waste as the hills over which he now rode.

The baggage-camels went slowly, weak with the mange that was the curse of Wejh, grazing all the way. The riders were tempted to hurry them but Auda said no; because of the long ride before them they must go slowly and spare their beasts. This was a country of white sand which dazzled the eyes cruelly, and they were glad when they came to a small oasis in a valley where an old man, his wife and daughters, the only inhabitants, had a garden among the palm-trees. They grew tobacco, beans, melons, cucumbers, egg-plants, and worked day and night without much thought of the world outside. The old man laughed at his visitors, asking what more to eat and drink all this fighting and suffering would bring; he could not understand their talk of Arab liberty. He only lived for his garden. Every new year he sold his tobacco and bought a shirt for himself, and one each for his household; his felt cap, his only other garment, had been his grandfather’s a century before.