Lawrence and the Arabs

by Robert Graves

Once more the tactics should be tip and run, not the regular advance of an organized army, and for this the eastern desert was most convenient. One might look on it as a sort of sea in which to manœuvre with camel-parties instead of ships. The railway, to cover it from the British Fleet, had been built down the eastern side of the central mountains and could be raided from the desert without fear of retaliation, for the Turks had no camel-corps worth anything, and in any case no important point to strike back against. From the war in the south Lawrence had learned that the best tactics were to use the smallest raiding parties on the fastest camels, and to strike at points widely separated with the most portable weapons of destruction. These weapons would be high-explosive for demolition work and light automatic guns, Hotchkiss or Lewis, which could be fired from the saddle of a camel running at eighteen miles an hour. Lawrence at once begged for quantities of these from Egypt.

The difficulty of the campaign was that, though all the tribes might join in the Revolt, their jealousies were such that no tribe could fight in a neighbour’s territory and no tribal combinations were possible as they had been in Arabia. Feisal’s authority in Syria was not great enough to heal the feuds. This meant that the brunt of the fighting had to be borne by a small force of Ageyl and others from the south, against whom, as distant strangers under the command of members of the Prophet’s family, there was not so much prejudice. It was impossible for the Turks to foresee the strength and direction of the attacks: the camels could, after a watering, travel two hundred and fifty miles in three days; and in an emergency could go a hundred and ten miles in twenty-four hours. (Twice Lawrence’s famous Ghazala did one hundred and forty-three miles of a march alone with him.) This meant that it might not be impossible to strike at points near Maan on Monday, near Amman on Thursday, near Deraa on Saturday, and to get fresh tribesmen and camels from each district to join in the attack. Above all, the regular raiders must be self-supporting. From Akaba they could go out with six-weeks’ flour-ration and ammunition, explosive and gold, and do without the complicated system of supply-trains and dumps which slows down the pace and shortens the fighting range of every regular army.

There must be no discipline in the ordinary sense of a chain of command going down from general to colonel, to captain, to lieutenant, to sergeant, to corporal, to private; every man must be his own commander-in-chief, ready, if need be, for single combat against the enemy without waiting for orders from above or co-operation from his fellows. And discipline could not in any case have been enforced: the Arabs were independent by nature and were serving voluntarily. Honour was the only contract and every man was free to draw his pay up to date and go home at any time he liked; only the Ageyl and the small regular army under Jaafar were serving for a definite term, so that the war when fought was fought with goodwill. There were no shameful incidents like those on the Western Front where the first dead man that I saw was an English suicide, and the last one also.

Mr. Herbert Read, by the way, has made a rather unfortunate critical condemnation of Lawrence’s Seven Pillars as being an account of a campaign where men did not heroically suffer the machine-made boredom and agony of the Western trenches, and which therefore can hardly be taken seriously. This reads like a glorification of the more horrible sort of war at the expense of the less horrible, which cannot be what Mr. Read (an anti-militarist, and for good reason) intends. If he wishes to point out that all war is evil in itself, whatever its glamour, he should not complicate his argument by a false comparison of heroisms.

LAWRENCE’S RIDES

Six weeks had elapsed since the capture of Akaba, and the Arabs had had opportunity to strengthen themselves. Feisal and Jaafar had now arrived at Akaba with the army. Plentiful supplies were landed from Egypt and armoured cars and guns—though the long-range guns never arrived until the last month of the war—and Egyptian labourers to rebuild the town and turn round the fortifications to face inland. The defiles through the hills were strongly held. On the other hand, the Turks had also been busy and had the advice of the German general Falkenhayn who had been chiefly responsible for saving them two years before at the Dardanelles. They had sent down a whole division to Maan and fortified it until it was quite secure against attack except by the strong regular forces and heavy guns which the Arabs did not have. There was an aeroplane-station there now and great supply dumps.

It was probable that the Turks would try to retake Akaba by way of Aba el Lissan and Guweira. They had already pushed their way up to Aba el Lissan and fortified it while cavalry held the neighbouring hills. But Lawrence knew that Akaba was safe enough. He would even welcome a Turkish attempt on it, which could only end in great losses. There were Arab posts out north and south of the pass, and old Maulud with his mule-mounted regiment had taken up his position in the ancient ruins of Petra north of Maan and was encouraging the local tribes to raid the Turkish communications in competition with their rivals at Delagha, a few miles to their south. Raiding went on for weeks and the Turks got more and more irritated. To prick them into retaliation a long distance air-raid was made on Maan, from El Arish on the left of the British Army.

Thirty-two bombs were dropped about breakfast-time in and about the unprepared station: the aeroplanes flew dangerously low but returned safely the same morning to a temporary landing-ground thirty miles north of Akaba where the airmen patched up the shrapnel-torn wings of their machines. Two of their bombs had struck the barracks and killed a number of Turks, eight struck the engine-shed, doing great damage, one fell in the General’s kitchen, four on the aerodrome. The next morning they visited Aba el Lissan, bombed the horse-lines and stampeded the animals, and then the tents and stampeded the Turks. The same afternoon they decided to look for the battery of guns that had troubled them that morning; there was just enough petrol and bombs. Skimming the hill-crest they came over Aba el Lissan at a height of only three hundred feet. They interrupted the Turks’ usual midday sleep and took the place completely by surprise. They dropped thirty bombs, silenced the battery and were off again. The Turkish commander at Maan set his men digging bomb-proof shelters and dispersed his aeroplanes, when they had been repaired, for fear of a fresh attack on the aerodrome.

The next plan that Lawrence had for the Arabs was to reduce the troops that the Turks could spare for the Akaba attack by making frequent raids on the railway and so forcing them to defend it more strongly. The gloomy reaction after Aba el Lissan had long passed and left him adventurous as before and ready to kill without remorse. He thought out a series of demolitions for mid-September; it might be a good idea, too, to mine another train. He would try for one at a station called Mudowwara, eighty miles south of Maan, where a smashed train would greatly embarrass the enemy. Now, to make sure of the train new methods had to be found: the automatic mine was uncertain and might be set off by a trolley or by a train carrying civilian refugees which they would want to let pass; or, if the Turks put the engines to push instead of to pull the trains, might only explode under an unimportant wagon: and the train could then retire safely. What was wanted seemed to be a mine that could be exploded at will by electricity. The apparatus was sent to him from Egypt and explained by electricians on the guard-ship at Akaba. It consisted of a heavy white box, the exploder, and yards of heavy cable insulated with rubber. With the engine blown up and the train perhaps derailed, machine-guns and artillery would be needed to complete the destruction. For machine-guns, the Lewis guns would have to do, but artillery was a problem because to take along even the smallest mountain-guns meant slow travelling. Lawrence then thought of the Stokes trench-mortars which had lately been used successfully in France. They were simple guns, like small drain-pipes, tilted at an angle on a tripod. Down the mouth a heavy shell was allowed to slide, and when it struck the bottom a charge in its base was fired and it went flying two or three hundred yards and burst according to a time-fuse. This was not too short a range for a railway ambush and the Stokes shell was powerfully charged with ammonal.